Improving Wikipedia-Based Place Name Disambiguation in Short Texts Using Structured Data from Dbpedia

Improving Wikipedia-Based Place Name Disambiguation in Short Texts Using Structured Data from Dbpedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2014, written by Yingjie Hu, Krzysztof Janowicz and Sathya Prasad.

Overview

Place name disambiguation is an important task for improving the accuracy of geographic information retrieval. This task becomes more challenging when the input texts are short. Wikipedia provides information about places and has often been employed for named entity recognition. However, the natural language representation of Wikipedia articles limits more effective use of this rich knowledge base. DBpedia is the Semantic Web version of Wikipedia, which provides structured and machine-understandable knowledge mined from Wikipedia articles. This paper presents an approach for combining Wikipedia and DBpedia to disambiguate place names in short texts. Authors discuss the pros and cons of the two knowledge bases, and argue that a combination of both performs better than each of them alone. Authors evaluate proposed method by conducting experiments against baselines of three established methods. The result indicates that method has a generally higher precision and recall. While study employs DBpedia, the proposed method is generic and can be extended to other structured Linked Datasets such as Freebase or Wikidata.