Geotagging a Diachronic Corpus of Alpine Texts: Comparing Distinct Approaches to Toponym Recognition

Tannon Kew, Anastassia Shaitarova, Isabel Meraner, Janis Goldzycher, Simon Clematide, Martin Volk


Abstract
Geotagging historic and cultural texts provides valuable access to heritage data, enabling location-based searching and new geographically related discoveries. In this paper, we describe two distinct approaches to geotagging a variety of fine-grained toponyms in a diachronic corpus of alpine texts. By applying a traditional gazetteer-based approach, aided by a few simple heuristics, we attain strong high-precision annotations. Using the output of this earlier system, we adopt a state-of-the-art neural approach in order to facilitate the detection of new toponyms on the basis of context. Additionally, we present the results of preliminary experiments on integrating a small amount of crowdsourced annotations to improve overall performance of toponym recognition in our heritage corpus.
Anthology ID:
W19-9003
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology for Digital Historical Archives
Month:
September
Year:
2019
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Cristina Vertan, Petya Osenova, Dimitar Iliev
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd.
Note:
Pages:
11–18
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-9003
DOI:
10.26615/978-954-452-059-5_003
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tannon Kew, Anastassia Shaitarova, Isabel Meraner, Janis Goldzycher, Simon Clematide, and Martin Volk. 2019. Geotagging a Diachronic Corpus of Alpine Texts: Comparing Distinct Approaches to Toponym Recognition. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology for Digital Historical Archives, pages 11–18, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd..
Cite (Informal):
Geotagging a Diachronic Corpus of Alpine Texts: Comparing Distinct Approaches to Toponym Recognition (Kew et al., RANLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-9003.pdf