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Reading Geography between the Lines: Extracting Local Place Knowledge from Text

  • Conference paper
Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8116))

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Abstract

The computational linguistics tool Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) can approximately map out geographic placenames within spatially unreferenced web-based text. This paper discusses LSA’s practical potential to help discover and locate local vernacular (unofficial) geographic names. It may also highlight people’s cognitive distortions and biases, creating hypotheses for human experiments, and hinting at identical mechanisms for semantic and spatial memory at these scales. Some successes, problems and methodological issues are illustrated and discussed, with reference to a sample dataset of one area of England. Previous findings were replicated and surpassed, but the space may show more topological than metric tendencies.

This research was funded by Ordnance Survey of Great Britain.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Psychology (HJB), University of Winchester, King Alfred Campus, Sparkford Road, Winchester, SO22 4NR, United Kingdom

    Clare Davies

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  1. Clare Davies
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Linguistics & English Language, Bangor University, College Road, LL57 2DG, Bangor, UK

    Thora Tenbrink

  2. School of Computing, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK

    John Stell

  3. College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Harrison Building, North Park Road, EX4 4QF, Exeter, UK

    Antony Galton  & Zena Wood  & 

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Davies, C. (2013). Reading Geography between the Lines: Extracting Local Place Knowledge from Text. In: Tenbrink, T., Stell, J., Galton, A., Wood, Z. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01789-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01790-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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