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Disambiguating Geographic Names in a Historical Digital Library

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Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2163))

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Abstract

Geographic interfaces provide natural, scalable visualizations for many digital library collections, but the wide range of data in digital libraries presents some particular problems for identifying and disambiguating place names. We describe the toponym-disambiguation system in the Perseus digital library and evaluate its performance. Name categorization varies significantly among different types of documents, but toponym disambiguation performs at a high level of precision and recall with a gazetteer an order of magnitude larger than most other applications.

This research was supported by a grant from the Digital Libraries Initiative, Phase 2, with primary funding from the National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Perseus Project, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    David A. Smith & Gregory Crane

Authors
  1. David A. Smith
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  2. Gregory Crane
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, Leof. Knossou, P.O. Box 1470, 71409, Heraklion, Greece

    Panos Constantopoulos

  2. Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, Institute of Computer Science, Vassilika Vouton, P.O. Box 1385, 71110, Heraklion, Greece

    Panos Constantopoulos

  3. Department of Computer and Information Science, The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    Ingeborg T. Sølvberg

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© 2001 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Smith, D.A., Crane, G. (2001). Disambiguating Geographic Names in a Historical Digital Library. In: Constantopoulos, P., Sølvberg, I.T. (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. ECDL 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2163. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44796-2_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44796-2_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42537-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-44796-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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