I.

Extraction of toponyms and spatial relations

Automatic Itinerary Reconstruction from Texts
Ludovic MONCLA
1,2
ludovic.moncla@univ-pau.fr
Fig. 1: Block diagram of our processing chain

1
LIUPPA, Avenue de l'Universit Pau, France
2
Universidad de Zaragoza, C/ Maria de Luna, 1, Zaragoza, Spain

3
Universit Paris-Est, IGN, Laboratoire COGIT, 73 av. de Paris, 94160 Saint-Mand, France

We defined an expanded spatial named entity (ESNE) as
I,G,T: spatial relations, geographical terms and toponyms.
! ! !

We also annotate motion expressions (classified verbs).
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! We use geographical databases to find a geo-coded
representation of the extracted toponyms.

! Results are including a lot of ambiguities:
- Several toponyms can have the same name;
- One toponym can have several names;
- Resources are not exhaustives.

! Subtyping toponyms and clustering methods are used to
disambiguate toponyms.
- "hamlet of Fontanettes" is not found in databases
- sub-toponym "Fontanettes" obtains several results
- one of them with the metadata type="hamlet"
Example of result:
{{Walk,.motion} to {{the refuge,.commonNoun} {south of,.indirection}
{{hamlet,.subType} of {Fontanettes,.subToponym}
,.candidateToponym} ,. ESNE},.VT}
"#$%&' ()*%+,'
)*+*,-./ 012345 632765
8'92 : ;$/<=>/ ?@2@1 A?2?B
Fig 4: Result after clustering
Table 1: Toponyms found in databases
We use a clustering algorithm to disambiguate toponyms
! Corpus
- 30 hiking descriptions manually annotated
- French, Spanish, Italian

Fig 2: Example of transducer
! Extraction of toponyms
- 99.26% of toponyms are well extracted
- 1.63% of wrong detection (person names, organizations,!)
- 54.47% of toponyms are associated with spatial relations
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7CA
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7C4
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7C1
D$*,E.$/
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!IJ
- 30-60% of toponyms:
= 1 result
- 10% of toponyms:
> 20 results

Fig 3: Distribution of number of results (french)
II. Toponyms resolution
! Resolution of toponyms
- BDNyme (IGN), Geonames, OpenStreetMap

! Cascade of transducers
- Spatial relations
- Toponyms
- ESNE
- Motion expressions

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! Itinerary reconstruction
- Propose a method of route calculation:

o Use information extracted from textual description
- perception of places not reached
- negation (don't go to, etc)
- directionnal information (south, north, etc)
o Use spatial analysis to link places

- Combine language and spatial analysis to order places
and reconstruct the path

Supervisors: M. Gaio
1
, J. Nogueras-Iso
2
In partnership with S. Mustire
3
L M ? ? N L N @ @ N L N A7 L O A7
Experiments