A Pragmatic Guide to Geoparsing Evaluation
share
Empirical methods in geoparsing have thus far lacked a standard evaluation framework described as the task, data and metrics used to establish state-of-the-art systems. Evaluation is further made inconsistent, even unrepresentative of real-world usage, by the lack of distinction between the different types of toponyms, which necessitates new guidelines, a consolidation of metrics and a detailed toponym taxonomy with implications for Named Entity Recognition (NER). To address these deficiencies, our manuscript introduces such framework in three parts. Part 1) Task Definition: clarified via corpus linguistic analysis proposing a fine-grained Pragmatic Taxonomy of Toponyms with new guidelines. Part 2) Evaluation Data: shared via a dataset called GeoWebNews to provide test/train data to enable immediate use of our contributions. In addition to fine-grained Geotagging and Toponym Resolution (Geocoding), this dataset is also suitable for prototyping machine learning NLP models. Part 3) Metrics: discussed and reviewed for a rigorous evaluation with appropriate recommendations for NER/Geoparsing practitioners.
READ FULL TEXT