Leveraging VGI for Gazetteer Enrichment: A Case Study for Geoparsing Twitter Messages

With the advent of Volunteered Geographical Information (VGI), the amount of user-contributed spatial data grows around the world each day. Such spatial data may contain valuable information which may help other research fields, such as the Digital Gazetteers used in Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR), for instance. The Digital Gazetteers have a powerful role in the geoparsing process. They need to keep themselves up-to-date and as complete as possible to enable geoparsers to perform lookup and then resolve toponym recognition precisely over digital texts. In this context, this paper proposes a method of gazetteer enrichment leveraging VGI data sources. Indeed VGI environments are not originally developed to work as gazetteers, however, they often contain more detailed and up-to-date information than gazetteers. Our method is applied in a geoparser environment by adapting its heuristics set besides enriching the corresponding gazetteer. A case study was performed by geoparsing Twitter messages focused solely on the microtexts in order to evaluate the performance of the enriched system. The results obtained were compared with previous results of a case study that used the same dataset and both the gazetteer and the geoparser without improvements.