2009 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

A Study of Automatic Recognition Mechanisms of Meanings of Location Names in Document Databases

Research Project

Project/Area Number	19700089
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	Media informatics/Database
Research Institution	Gunma University (2008-2009) Nagoya Institute of Technology (2007)
Principal Investigator	HOSOKAWA Yoshihide Gunma University, 大学院・工学研究科, 講師 (50312830)
Project Period (FY)	2007 – 2009
Keywords	意味認識 / 文書検索 / 位置情報システム / 空間的文脈
Research Abstract	We developed a context-dependent geocoding system in our previous work. Geocoding systems are designed for translating location names to corresponding geocodes. The main feature of our geocoding system is to recognize the meanings of ambiguous location representations by handling the spatial contexts of the representations. We define a spatial context as a set of terms strongly relating to a single meaning of an ambiguous location representation. Our geocoding system was implemented to use a special metadatabase maintaining spatial contexts of landmarks. In this study, we have developed a new implementation method for generating the metadatabase. The main feature of our method is to extract the spatial contexts of landmarks by handle the co-occurrence of the landmark names and feature words in a text database. Thus, our geocoding system can be applied to various text databases. We have demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of our method through several experiments.