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Creating a Corpus of Geospatial Natural Language

  • Conference paper
Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8116))

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Abstract

The description of location using natural language is of interest for a number of research activities including the automated interpretation and generation of natural language to ease interaction with geographic information systems. For such activities, examples of geospatial natural language are usually collected from the personal knowledge of researchers, or in small scale collection activities specific to the project concerned. This paper describes the process used to develop a more generic corpus of geospatial natural language.

The paper discusses the development and evaluation of four methods for semi-automated harvesting of geospatial natural language clauses from text to create a corpus of geospatial natural language. The most successful method uses a set of geospatial syntactic templates that describe common patterns of grammatical geospatial word categories and provide a precision of 0.66. Particular challenges were posed by the range of English dialects included, as well as metaphoric and sporting references.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nottingham Geospatial Institute, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom

    Kristin Stock, Robert C. Pasley, Zoe Gardner, Paul Brindley, Jeremy Morley & Claudia Cialone

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  1. Kristin Stock
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  2. Robert C. Pasley
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  3. Zoe Gardner
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  4. Paul Brindley
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  5. Jeremy Morley
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  6. Claudia Cialone
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Linguistics & English Language, Bangor University, College Road, LL57 2DG, Bangor, UK

    Thora Tenbrink

  2. School of Computing, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK

    John Stell

  3. College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Harrison Building, North Park Road, EX4 4QF, Exeter, UK

    Antony Galton  & Zena Wood  & 

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Stock, K., Pasley, R.C., Gardner, Z., Brindley, P., Morley, J., Cialone, C. (2013). Creating a Corpus of Geospatial Natural Language. In: Tenbrink, T., Stell, J., Galton, A., Wood, Z. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01789-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01790-7

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