Improving Toponym Disambiguation by Iteratively Enhancing Certainty of Extraction

Named entity extraction (NEE) and disambiguation (NED) have received much attention in recent years. Typical fields addressing these topics are information retrieval, natural language processing, and semantic web. This paper addresses two problems with toponym extraction and disambiguation (as a representative example of named entities). First, almost no existing works examine the extraction and disambiguation interdependency. Second, existing disambiguation techniques mostly take as input extracted named entities without considering the uncertainty and imperfection of the extraction process. It is the aim of this paper to investigate both avenues and to show that explicit handling of the uncertainty of annotation has much potential for making both extraction and disambiguation more robust. We conducted experiments with a set of holiday home descriptions with the aim to extract and disambiguate toponyms. We show that the extraction confidence probabilities are useful in enhancing the effectiveness of disambiguation. Reciprocally, retraining the extraction models with information automatically derived from the disambiguation results, improves the extraction models. This mutual reinforcement is shown to even have an effect after several automatic iterations.