Similarity matching for integrating spatial information extracted from place descriptions

Place descriptions are used in everyday communication as a common way to convey spatial information. Processing the information from place descriptions poses multiple significant challenges because these descriptions are written in natural language. In particular, corpora of place descriptions provide a plethora of human spatial knowledge beyond geographical information system, even if these descriptions refer to the same places in various ways. This article focuses on resolving ambiguous or synonymous place names from place descriptions by exploring the given relationships with other spatial features. It matches place names from multiple descriptions by developing a novel labelled graph matching process that relies solely on the comparison of string, linguistic and spatial similarities between identified places. This process uses unstructured place descriptions as an input, and produces a composite place graph with qualitative spatial relations from the descriptions. The performance of this novel process exceeds current toponym resolution by coping with non-gazetteered places.