Vernacular place names are names that are commonly in use to refer to geographical places. For purposes of effective information retrieval, the spatial extent associated with these names should reflect peoples perception of the place, even though this may differ sometimes from the administrative definition of the same place name. Due to their informal nature, vernacular place names are hard to ...

We present an algorithm, Nomen, for learning generalized names in text. Examples of these are names of diseases and infectious agents, such as bacteria and viruses. These names exhibit certain properties that make their identi cation more complex than that of regular proper names. Nomen uses a novel form of bootstrapping to grow sets of textual instances and of their contextual patterns. The al...

For readers of English text who know some Chinese, Pinyin codes that spell out Chinese names are often ambiguous as to their original Chinese character representations if the names are new or not well known. For English-Chinese cross language retrieval, failure to accurately translate Pinyin names in a query to Chinese characters can lead to dismal retrieval effectiveness. This paper presents a...

ITPs use names for proved theorems. Good names are either widely known or descriptive, corresponding to a theorem’s statement. Good names should be consistent with conventions, and be easy to remember. But thinking of names like this for every intermediate result is a burden: some developers avoid this by using consecutive integers or random hashes instead. We ask: is it possible to relieve the...