Placename Ambiguity Resolution

It is common for placenames to reference other named entities (e.g. names of people, names of organizations, etc.) and to be used as vocabulary words (e.g. city of Split). Apart from reference ambiguity, placenames are faced with the problem of referent ambiguity (i.e., a placename referring to multiple places). Many places are also referred to by multiple names (e.g. Netherlands vs. Holland). In this paper we describe an approach to placename ambiguity resolution i.e. place reference resolution, resolution of a document’s geographical scope and placename referent resolution. The approach is composed of three components: (1) geographical tagger, (2) geographical scope resolver and (3) placename referent resolver.