Geographic Signatures for Semantic Retrieval

摘要

Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) systems rely on the identification and disambiguation of place names in documents to determine the region about which they are relevant. The place names are mapped into geographic concepts and used to assign an encompassing concept (a scope) to each document. However, sometimes a single scope is too restrictive and insufficient for capturing the geographic semantics of a document. We propose as an alternative to abstract the geographic semantics of a document as a geographic signature, which is a list of maximally disambiguated geographic references found in a document. A signature can be used in multiple GIR applications, such as in building a geographic index for a document collection. We perform the disambiguation of the possible geographic meanings using semantic similarity measures.