Improved Document Geocoding for Geo-complex Text
Ian Patullo · 2008
Document geocoding is the process of assigning a spatial reference to a piece of text based on an analysis of its content. This project is concerned with improving geocoding performance on text with high geo-complexity, that is, text which traditional systems struggle to tag correctly. During the course of this dissertation we produce an ontological framework which describes the way current techniques identify locations in text, and develop new heuristics that work specifically where the the old ones fail. Using a performance metric that combines the accuracy of assignment with the number of false positives and the overall coverage of place names in a document, we show that our system is capable of improving performance in some texts with high geo-complexity, while attaining similar performance on more standard texts.