Improving Toponym Resolution with Better Candidate Generation, Transformer-based Reranking, and Two-Stage Resolution

Understand

Geocoding is the task of converting location mentions in text into structured data that encodes the geospatial semantics.

• We propose a new architecture for geocoding, GeoNorm.
• GeoNorm first uses information retrieval techniques to generate a list of candidate entries from the geospatial ontology.
• Then it reranks the candidate entries using a transformer-based neural network that incorporates information from the ontology such as the entry's population.