Geographic co-occurrence as a tool for GIR

In this paper we describe the development of a geographic co-occurrence model and how it can be applied to geographic information retrieval. The model consists of mining cooccurrences of placenames from Wikipedia, and then mapping these placenames to locations in the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names. We begin by quantifying the accuracy of our model and compute theoretical bounds for the accuracy achievable when applied to placename disambiguation in free text. We conclude with a discussion of the improvement such a model could provide for placename disambiguation and geographic relevance ranking over traditional methods