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<Paper uid="W03-0105">
  <Title>Grounding spatial named entities for information extraction and question answering</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
7 Summary and Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Rich gazetteers can be helpful in determining unique geospatial referents and have many applications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Starting with a description of how spatial named entities can be grounded in the physical world using gazetteer knowledge in two different domains, we have described a heuristic method to resolve place names using such gazetteers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> We have then applied our method to the task of drawing maps from text automatically. These (geo-)graphical document surrogates give an overview about where a reported news event takes place. We do not know of previous attempts to create geographical maps automatically from unconstrained newswire text.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Many venues for further research can be conceived, for instance, a ner granularity of analysis could reveal more named entity classes (including e.g. brigdges and other artifacts) and their relative ortientation. Maps as created here could also be used to produce an animation from multiple documents (with different time-stamps) on the same topic to illustrate how the importance of places shifts over time, which could aid analysts in their timely identi cation of regions of crisis.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Acknowledgments. The authors are grateful to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN-ECE) for creating UN-LOCODE, to Johanna Moore, Michael Piotrowski, IBM UK, The National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh, Richard Baldock (MRC Genetics Unit) and the Edwina Gazetteer Project for discussions and support. The three anonymous reviewers helped to improve the quality of this paper. We would also like to acknowledge the nancial support for the rst author of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) under grant D/02/01831, of Linguit GmbH (research contract UK-2002/2), and the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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