Geospatial phrase grounding and disambiguation

GeoCoder is a spatial reasoning system that converts natural language inputs into a set of precise spatial coordinates to display on a map. GeoCoder's spatial knowledge is represented in a set of ontologies. GeoCoder parses input phrases and adds location reference individuals to its ontology model. Relationships between location references are recognized based on mid-level structural patterns in the parsed phrase. GeoCoder grounds (or finds possible geometries for) location references in an iterative process, in which locations are grounded based on their relationships to previously grounded locations. GeoCoder improves upon previous systems by grounding and disambiguating at the phrase level, interpreting parses with rules that match mid level structure patterns, expressing disambiguation heuristics in ontologies, and improving scalability by separating grounding from reasoning about relationships.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Slagle, Amy Michelle

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Boris Katz.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/46491

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/46491