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The objectives of this research work is to study the effects of toponym (place name) ambiguity in the Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) task. Our experience with GIR systems shows that toponym ambiguity may be an important factor in the inability of these systems to take advantage from geographical knowledge. Previous studies over ambiguity and Information Retrieval (IR) suggested that disambiguation may be useful in some specific IR scenario. We suppose that GIR may constitute such a scenario. This preliminary study was carried out over the WordNet based, manually disambiguated collection developed for the CLIR-WSD task, using the GeoCLEF collection of 100 geographically related topics. The employed GIR system was based on the GeoWorSE system that participated in GeoCLEF 2008. The experiments were carried out considering the manual disambiguation and comparing this result with those obtained by randomly disambiguating the document collection and those obtained by using always the most common referent. The obtained results show no significant difference in the overall results, although the work gave an insight into some errors that are produced by toponym ambiguity and how they may affect the results. These preliminary results also suggest that WordNet is not a suitable resource for the planned research.
Davide Buscaldi (Sun,) studied this question.