Fine-Grained Geographical Relation Extraction from Wikipedia

Abstract

In this paper, we present work on enhancing the basic data resource of a context-aware system. Electronic text offers a wealth of information about geospatial data and can be used to improve the completeness and accuracy of geospatial resources (e.g., gazetteers). First, we introduce a supervised approach to extracting geographical relations on a fine-grained level. Second, we present a novel way of using Wikipedia as a corpus based on self-annotation. A self-annotation is an automatically created high-quality annotation that can be used for training and evaluation. Wikipedia contains two types of different context: (i) unstructured text and (ii) structured data: templates (e.g., infoboxes about cities), lists and tables. We use the structured data to annotate the unstructured text. Finally, the extracted fine-grained relations are used to complete gazetteer data. The precision and recall scores of more than 97 percent confirm that a statistical IE pipeline can be used to improve the data quality of community-based resources.