Extracting Imprecise Geographical and Temporal References from Journey Narratives

Ezeani, Ignatius and Rayson, Paul and Gregory, Ian (2023) Extracting Imprecise Geographical and Temporal References from Journey Narratives. In: Text2Story 2023 Sixth Workshop on Narrative Extraction From Texts : Proceedings of Text2Story — Sixth Workshop on Narrative Extraction From Texts held in conjunction with the 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023). CEUR Workshop Proceedings . CEUR Workshop Proceedings, IRL, pp. 113-118.

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Abstract

Previous approaches to understanding geographies in textual sources tend to focus on geoparsing to automatically identify place names and allocate them to coordinates. Such methods are highly quantitative and are limited to named places for which coordinates can be found, and have little concept of time. Yet, as narratives of journeys make abundantly clear, human experiences of geography are often subjective and more suited to qualitative representation. In these cases, “geography” is not limited to named places; rather, it incorporates the vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, with references to, for example, “the camp”, or “the hills in the distance”, and includes the relative locations using terms such as “near to”, “on the left”, “north of” or “a few hours’ journey from”. In this demo paper, we describe our research prototype to extract and analyse qualitative and quantitative references to place and time in two corpora of English Lake District travel writing and Holocaust survivor testimonies.