Geo-mining: Discovery of Road and Transport Networks Using Directional Patterns

One of the most desired information types when planning a trip to some place is the knowledge of transport, roads and geographical connectedness of prominent sites in this place. While some transport companies or repositories make some of this information accessible, it is not easy to find, and the majority of information about uncommon places can only be found in web free text such as blogs and forums. In this paper we present an algorithmic framework which allows an automated acquisition of map-like information from the web, based on surface patterns like "from X to Y". Given a set of locations as initial seeds, we retrieve from the web an extended set of locations and produce a map-like network which connects these locations using transport type edges. We evaluate our framework in several settings, producing meaningful and precise connection sets.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Dmitry Davidov, Ari Rappoport
• Keywords: EMNLP 2009, Information, Natural Language Processing, Precise Connection Sets, Web Free Text