Research of Toponyms of the Irkutsk Region Using the Method of Artificial Intelligence

Essential issues of toponymy presuppose studying separate words to reconstruct the denotative meaning of geographical names that were lost in the modern language and to find out how the peculiarities of the local topography, the inhabitants’ activities, etc. are reflected in them. It is possible to solve this kind of problems using intellectual methods of data analysis on the basis of information technologies. However, in scientific literature on toponymy, such methods are practically ignored. The article is devoted to the study of the origin and semantic meanings of geographical names based on finding semantic associates and calculating the semantic similarity of words using the embedding model. According to the proposed method, the origin of some toponyms of the Irkutsk region was determined, their semantic relations were revealed. The dichotomy method was used for toponyms that have two roots in their structure. This made it possible to improve the operation of the model by clarifying the morphemic composition of the original word. The method of word transformation was used to determine the etymology of the toponym «Moscow». We have received new versions of the origin of the toponym. It is shown that the application of the methods based on distributive semantics and vector representation of words, obtained on the basis of large arrays of text data, significantly expands the possibilities of research in the field of determining the origin of toponyms and clarifying their meaning.