Geotagging a diachronic corpus of alpine texts: comparing distinct approaches to toponym recognition

Abstract

Geotagging historic and cultural texts provides valuable access to heritage data, enabling location-based searching and new geographically related discoveries. In this paper, we describe two distinct approaches to geotagging a variety of fine-grained toponyms in a diachronic corpus of alpine texts.
By applying a traditional gazetteer-based approach, aided by a few simple heuristics, we attain strong high-precision annotations.
Using the output of this earlier system, we adopt a state-of-the-art neural approach in order to facilitate the detection of new toponyms on the basis of context.
Additionally, we present the results of preliminary experiments on integrating a small amount of crowdsourced annotations to improve overall performance of toponym recognition in our heritage corpus.