So far away and yet so close

Place similarity has a central role in geographic information retrieval and geographic information systems, where spatial proximity is frequently just a poor substitute for semantic relatedness. For applications such as toponym disambiguation, alternative measures are thus required to answer the non-trivial question of place similarity in a given context. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to the construction of a network of locations from unstructured text data. By deriving similarity scores based on the textual distance of toponyms, we obtain a kind of relatedness that encodes the importance of the co-occurrences of place mentions. Based on the text of the English Wikipedia, we construct and provide such a network of place similarities, including entity linking to Wikidata as an augmentation of the contained information. In an analysis of centrality, we explore the networks capability of capturing the similarity between places. An evaluation of the network for the task of toponym disambiguation on the AIDA CoNLL-YAGO dataset reveals a performance that is in line with state-of-the-art methods.