Resolving fine granularity toponyms: Evaluation of a disambiguation approach

We present an approach of toponym disambiguation specialised on toponyms of fine spatial granularity. State of the art disambiguation approaches have manly focused on toponyms referring to populated places where a priori toponym knowledge is available for instance from gazetteers. However if we wish to resolve toponyms of fine spatial granularity such as those typically used to reference mountains hills fields or hamlets in natural landscape descriptions state of the art disambiguation approaches must be adapted to work independently from a priori toponym knowledge. We present an approach for toponym disambiguation working independently from such knowledge. We evaluate its performance over a baseline disambiguation technique on an extensive corpus consisting of 150 years of Swiss alpine literature. Toponym knowledge is gathered from geomorphometric characteristics at locations of toponyms. This reflects the strong relation between toponyms and topography since toponyms are used to name geographic objects that are attached to the earth’s surface and therefore can be hypothesised to be bound to its characteristics.