Identifying destinations automatically from human generated route directions

Automatic and accurate extraction of destinations in human-generated route descriptions facilitates visualizing text route descriptions on digital maps. Such information further supports research aiming at understanding human cognition of geospatial information. However, as reproted in previous work, the recognition of destinations is not satisfactory. In this paper, we show our approach and achievements in improving the accuracy of destination name recognition. We identified and evaluated multiple features for classifying a named entity to be either "destination" or "non-destination"; after that, we use a simple yet effective post-processing algorithm to improve classification accuracy. Comprehensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our approach.