Semantic Enrichment of Places - Understanding the Meaning of Public Places from Natural Language Texts

Authors

Abstract

In this thesis, we present our approach to the challenge of assigning semantic annotations to places, what we call Semantic Enrichment of Places. These annotations are automatically extracted by applying natural language pro- cessing and information extraction techniques that have been thoroughly applied and tested using the World Wide Web as the primary source. Here, we are particularly focused on extracting information that allows an ex- ternal system to distinguish one place from other places that are spatially or conceptually close. This is because the meaning of a place is a func- tion of its most salient features, present in the textual descriptions found in online resources about that place. In the situation under investigation, places correspond to Points Of Interest (POIs), as these are abundant on the Web. By definition, a POI is a place with meaning to someone and, if it is available online, it is likely that that person’s interest is shared by many people. In this approach, the Web is first crawled to obtain a large number of POIs and then each of them is analyzed in order to obtain their individual Semantic Index: the set of words that best define them. Besides analyzing POIs, we also propose the application of such an approach in several different contexts and we integrate these contexts in a multi-faceted view of place.

Keywords

Semantics of Place, Information Extraction, Automatic Tagging, Natural Language Processing

Subject

Semantic Enrichment of Places

Related Project

Crowds - Understanding urban land use from digital footprints of crowds

PhD Thesis

Semantic Enrichment of Places - Understanding the Meaning of Public Places from Natural Language Texts, July 2012

PDF File