Automatic Construction of a Large-Scale Corpus for Geoparsing Using Wikipedia Hyperlinks
This addresses the need for better evaluation resources in geoparsing, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods using Wikipedia data.
The authors tackled the problem of limited scale and coverage in existing geoparsing corpora by proposing Wikipedia Hyperlink-based Location Linking (WHLL) to construct a large-scale corpus, resulting in the WHLL corpus with 1.3M articles and 45.6% ambiguous location expressions.
Geoparsing is the task of estimating the latitude and longitude (coordinates) of location expressions in texts. Geoparsing must deal with the ambiguity of the expressions that indicate multiple locations with the same notation. For evaluating geoparsing systems, several corpora have been proposed in previous work. However, these corpora are small-scale and suffer from the coverage of location expressions on general domains. In this paper, we propose Wikipedia Hyperlink-based Location Linking (WHLL), a novel method to construct a large-scale corpus for geoparsing from Wikipedia articles. WHLL leverages hyperlinks in Wikipedia to annotate multiple location expressions with coordinates. With this method, we constructed the WHLL corpus, a new large-scale corpus for geoparsing. The WHLL corpus consists of 1.3M articles, each containing about 7.8 unique location expressions. 45.6% of location expressions are ambiguous and refer to more than one location with the same notation. In each article, location expressions of the article title and those hyperlinks to other articles are assigned with coordinates. By utilizing hyperlinks, we can accurately assign location expressions with coordinates even with ambiguous location expressions in the texts. Experimental results show that there remains room for improvement by disambiguating location expressions.