A reasoning model for geo-referencing named and unnamed spatial entities in natural language place descriptions

ABSTRACT We investigate means to automatically interpret natural language place descriptions, i.e., to relate all nouns in the input text that represent geographic entities to corresponding entities in a geographic database. This task is often referred to as geo-referencing. Automated methods can contribute to text-based human-machine interaction with geographic information systems (GIS) and enable volunteered geographic information (VGI) to be obtained from natural language descriptions. This paper is aimed to investigate the contribution of reasoning. We propose a set of spatial and ontological reasoning steps that help resolve ambiguous interpretationsin particular, regarding the interpretation of unnamed entities (a park, a river, etc.). By evaluating the method on a corpus of place descriptions, we show that incorporating reasoning techniques improves the performance of interpreting place descriptions.