Improving wikipedia-based place name disambiguation in short texts using structured data from DBpedia

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. We discuss the pros and cons of the two knowledge bases, and argue that a combination of both performs better than each of them alone. We evaluate our proposed method by conducting experiments against baselines of three established methods. The result indicates that our method has a generally higher precision and recall. While our study employs DBpedia, the proposed method is generic and can be extended to other structured Linked Datasets such as Freebase or Wikidata.