Evaluation of georeferencing

In this paper we describe a georeferencing system which first uses Information Extraction techniques to identify place names in textual documents and which then resolves the place names against a choice of gazetteers. We have used the system to georeference three digitised historical collections and have evaluated its performance against human annotated gold standard samples from the three collections. We have also evaluated its performance on the SpatialML corpus which is a geo-annotated corpus of newspaper text. The main focus of this paper is the evaluation of georesolution and we discuss evaluation methods and issues arising from the evaluation.