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GeoTxt: A scalable geoparsing system for unstructured text geolocation
Author(s) -
Karimzadeh Morteza,
Pezanowski Scott,
MacEachren Alan M.,
Wallgrün Jan O.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
transactions in gis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.721
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1467-9671
pISSN - 1361-1682
DOI - 10.1111/tgis.12510
Subject(s) - computer science , geolocation , information retrieval , scalability , named entity recognition , search engine indexing , heuristics , ranking (information retrieval) , resolution (logic) , artificial intelligence , world wide web , database , management , economics , task (project management) , operating system
In this article we present GeoTxt, a scalable geoparsing system for the recognition and geolocation of place names in unstructured text. GeoTxt offers six named entity recognition (NER) algorithms for place name recognition, and utilizes an enterprise search engine for the indexing, ranking, and retrieval of toponyms, enabling scalable geoparsing for streaming text. GeoTxt offers a flexible application programming interface (API), allowing for customized attribute and/or spatial ranking of retrieved toponyms. We evaluate the system on a corpus of manually geo‐annotated tweets. First, we benchmark the performance of the six NERs that GeoTxt provides access to. Second, we assess GeoTxt toponym resolution accuracy incrementally, demonstrating improvements in toponym resolution achieved (or not achieved) by adding specific heuristics and disambiguation methods. Compared to using the GeoNames web service, GeoTxt's toponym resolution demonstrates a 20% accuracy gain. Our results show that places mentioned in the same tweet do not tend to be geographically proximate.