A survey on the geographic scope of textual documents

Recognizing references to places in texts is needed in many applications, such as search engines, location-based social media and document classification. In this paper we present a survey of methods and techniques for the recognition and identification of places referenced in texts. We discuss concepts and terminology, and propose a classification of the solutions given in the literature. We introduce a definition of the Geographic Scope Resolution (GSR) problem, dividing it in three steps: geoparsing, reference resolution, and grounding references. Solutions to the first two steps are organized according to the method used, and solutions to the third step are organized according to the type of output produced. We found that it is difficult to compare existing solutions directly to one another, because they often create their own benchmarking data, targeted to their own problem. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.