Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Digital Earth on 06/09/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17538947.2017.1371253
Accepted author manuscript, 490 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 6/09/2017 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | International Journal of Digital Earth |
Number of pages | 26 |
Publication Status | E-pub ahead of print |
Early online date | 6/09/17 |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
Several tasks related to geographical information retrieval and to the geographical information sciences involve toponym matching, that is, the problem of matching place names that share a common referent. In this article, we present the results of a wide-ranging evaluation on the performance of different string similarity metrics over the toponym matching task. We also report on experiments involving the usage of supervised machine learning for combining multiple similarity metrics, which has the natural advantage of avoiding the manual tuning of similarity thresholds. Experiments with a very large dataset show that the performance differences for the individual similarity metrics are relatively small, and that carefully tuning the similarity threshold is important for achieving good results. The methods based on supervised machine learning, particularly when considering ensembles of decision trees, can achieve good results on this task, significantly outperforming the individual similarity metrics.