BUT Recognizer of GeoNames

name entitiy recognition, geonames.org, finite state automaton

There are many aspects and objectives we had in mind when designing the new NER. First, it should avoid the performance bottlenecks common for the webbased APIs such as OpenCalais or AlchemyAPI. Second, it needs to achieve excellent precision and recall for geographical features, especially for places in Europe. Finally, the tool should perform disambiguation and normalization alongside the recognition process.
To meet the second objective, we utilized the Geonames.org data exported from the database, which contains over 10 millions geographical features. Efficiency is brought by the finite state automaton (FSA) technology that can deal with the huge lists of names and is very fast in searching the input texts. We employed an efficient algorithm for constructing the minimal FSA described in Daciuk et al. (1998). A freely available package provided by the first author of the paper allows building a minimal FSA from a list of pre-defined keywords. The resulting representation for all the relevant data from GeoNames (originally over 1.1 GB) takes only 71MB and the processing is extremely fast.

www.fit.vutbr.cz/~iotrusina/BURGeoN-0.1.tar.gz

Authorized software license

Brno University of Technology, faculty of Information Technology IČ 00216305, Božetěchova 2, 612 66 Brno, (further only FIT BUT) is entitled to license the authorized software accessible at the "Authorized software" page http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/research/prod/index.php?id=177 (further only authorized software). Everyone who uses the software in any way at least once becomes the user. The user agrees to comply to the following conditions of use.

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Authorized software

• is only possible to use in compliance with these license conditions; the user must ensure that the conditions are fulfilled by the eventual third party who is able to access the authorized software,
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