GeoDISCO: Encyclopedic Geographical Discourse in France from the - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

ludovic.moncla@liris.cnrs.fr GIR’19

GeoDISCO: Encyclopedic Geographical Discourse in France from the Enlightenment to Wikipedia

• D. Vigier, T. Joliveau, L. Moncla, K. McDonough, A. Brenon

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 2/22

What is this project about?

The GéoDisco Project asks How does geographical discourse develop in French encyclopedias between the 18th century and today?

1 Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par

une Société de Gens de lettres (1751-1772) edited by Diderot and d’Alembert 1

2 Encyclopedia Universalis (2018 digital edition) 3 French Wikipedia (July 2018)

• 1. https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 3/22

Overview

Three main axes

• 1. Named Entity Recognition and Classification in the EDDA
• Improving NER with a linguistic approach
• 2. Toponym Disambiguation
• Building a network of relations between toponyms
• 3. Extracting explicit locations in EDDA
• Extracting and interpreting geographical coordinates from EDDA articles

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 4/22

Improving NER with a linguistic approach

Corpus analysis using the TXM platform (http://textometrie.ens-lyon.fr/)

• The goal is to find specific patterns in order to improve the PERDIDO NER rules

Methodology

• Identify the most frequent proper nouns in the geography subcorpus based on

the POS tagging (Treetagger)

• Manual selection of the 30 most frequent occurrences for several types of

entities

• country, city, region, person.
• For each list, compute the co-occurrences ordered by the specificity score

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 5/22

Improving NER with a linguistic approach

Most important co-occurrences

Position Place Person country city region

• 1

de, en , le de, à, dans de, en , le par , de, selon , sous , suivant

• 2

de, dans , bourg, royaume, rivière, roi, ... ville, cour, parlement, prévot, ... coutume, France, duc, comte, ... saint, roi, empereur, pape, ... +1 punctuation mark punctuation mark numeric value punctuation mark et punctation mark I , II , IV , ... +2 dans, au, capitale, royaume, ... numeric value Sicile, géographie, Valais, Baptiste, ...

• prepositions, list of nouns, . . .

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 6/22

Improving NER with a linguistic approach

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 7/22

Toponym Disambiguation and Historical Texts : Challenges

There is no gazetteer for the 18th-c. world

• Modern or historical gazetteers contain lots of noise
• Typical ranking solutions do not apply well in these cases (e.g. population)
• EDDA’s complex structure means that one geography article may refers to more

than one place

• Sometimes it is impossible to match a record in any resource to a toponym
• articles explicitly refuse to pin down a location for a toponym
• there is no existing gazetteer record for a place that was nonetheless documented in the past

We propose to make use of toponym relations and attributes internal to the corpus

• f documents itself for toponym resolution

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 8/22

Building the Network

EDDA contains 20.7 million words in 44 632 entries among them 14 457 articles classified as ’geographie’ Nodes

• get the list of headwords from articles metadata
• normalize headwords
• prepositions, punctuation marks, and/or alternate names or spelling
• e.g. ’Brassaw, ou Gronstat’, ’Adiazzo, Adiazze ou Ajaccio’

Edges

• relationship between nodes
• extract place names with a custom version of the Perdido geoparser
• a new edge is created between the current node and all the corresponding node of each

toponym in the content

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 9/22

In-degree centrality

Rank Node Score 1 france 0.1130 2 italie 0.0853 3 allemagne 0.0814 4 afrique 0.0481 5 espagne 0.0462 6 naples 0.0211 7 pologne 0.0199 8 paris 0.0183 9

• céan

0.0161 10 perse 0.0158

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 10/22

Betweenness centrality

Rank Node Score 1 mer méditerranée 0.0373 2 france 0.0223 3 allemagne 0.0223 4 natolie 0.0220 5 monde 0.0136 6 italie 0.0131 7 lycie 0.0129 8 lycus 0.0126 9 issus 0.0122 10 europe 0.0102

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 11/22

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 12/22

Using the Network for Disambiguation

Our hypothesis is that the quantitative citation network reveals qualitative relations.

• We compute an ego-centered network
• We compute the betweenness centrality measure of this ego-network
• The node with the highest value is selected as the most related.

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 13/22

Using the Network for Disambiguation

83 over 100 responses are correct For a city the method returns the name of the country to which it belongs aziruth → egypte cezimbra → portugal . . . For a country it returns the name of a neighboring location pérou → egypte vénézuéla → grenade (la nouvelle) . . . In 18% of correct answers (15 over 83) the returned name is not present in the content of the article isaurie → natolie salé → mer méditerranée walcheren → flessingue . . .

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 14/22

Classification of nodes

city 6 378 unclassified 5 041 hydronym 1 193 country 1 033 mountain 174

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 15/22

Extracting explicit locations in EDDA

Some articles of EDDA are explicitly located

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 16/22

Extracting Geographic coordinates in EDDA

Many kinds of location expressions

• By absolute geographic coordinates
• Long. 22. 30. latit. 45. 33
• By distances to other locations
• à 5 lieues au midi & au dessou de Lyon, à 15 au nord-ouest de Grenoble, & à 108 au sud-est

de Paris.

• By spatial relations
• On a line: sur le bord oriental du Rhône
• Within an area: province de France
• Adjacent to an other entity: bornée à l’occident par le Rhône
• By logical relations
• Grenoble en est la capitale
• . . .

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 17/22

Extracting Geographic coordinates in EDDA

Problems and constraints

• Iregular expressions
• References to different kind of entities
• Point: pair of coordinates
• Area: 4 latitude and longitude references
• Several pairs of coordinates
• More of one place in the article
• Several supposition of one location

according to different sources of authors

Examples

• long. 62. 50. lat. 3. 28.
• Lat. 42. 8. long.. 67. 35.
• Long. 36. 4. lat. 40. 48. (D. J.)
• Long. 40. 5. latit. 62. 6.
• Lat. 14. 20 - 16. 15. long. 58. 30 - 59.
• Lat. 42 degrés, 20 minutes long. 306 degrés, 50 & quelques

minutes.

• Lat. 37 degrés long. 27 & demi
• long. 135. 20. lat. mérid.
• Long. 18 d. 26 ’. 6". lat. 48 d. 57 ’. 43". CONCHITE
• entre le 32 & le 41 de long. & le 10 & le 20 de lat
• à 12 d. de long . & à 33. de latit
• la long. à 103. 50. & la lat. à 26
• Long. 110 d. & lat. 46. 45. selon Uluhbeg; & long . 116. &
• lat. 45. selon Nassiredden.
• Abulféda lui donne 78 d. 4 ’. de long. . elle a, selon

quelques - uns, 43 d. 30 ’. de latit. septentrionale. (GIUND)

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 18/22

Looking for textual patterns

Comparison of two methods

Interactive exploration + manual extraction

• CQL Queries (TXM)
• [word="Longitude"]|[word ="Longit"]|[word="Long"]| [word="longitude"]|[word

="longit"]|[word="long"]

• [word="Latitude"]|[word ="Latit"]|[word="Lat"]|[word="latitude"]| [word="lat"]|[word="lat"]
• Laborious and fastidious rearrangement of the results
• A useful knowledge of the different cases found in EDDA

Automatic annotation of most frequent redundant patterns

• Automatic retrieval
• Missing some specific cases
• situé entre le 45 & 47 degré de long. & entre le 15 & 23 degré de lat.
• sous le troisième degré de long et sous le 20e de lat

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 19/22

Georeferencing the place names

• Still at the very beginning
• 4702 articles have coordinates (merging the results of the 2 methods)
• Shortcomings
• Longitude missing (sometimes)
• North or South precision missing for latitude (quite often)
• Prime meridian?
• Officially in France since Richelieu: Ferro Meridian

In fact located by Delisle at 20˚ of Paris Meridian

• d’Alembert in the articles Latitude and Méridien of EDDA:

sometime the authors use a local meridian

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 20/22

https://arcg.is/1STjfW

GeoDISCO GIR’19 – 21/22

https://arcg.is/1STjfW

Thank you for your attention

CONTACT Ludovic Moncla ludovic.moncla@liris.cnrs.fr Thierry Joliveau thierry.joliveau@univ-st-etienne.fr