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GeoMantis: Inferring the Geographic Focus of Text using Knowledge Bases

We consider the problem of identifying the geographic focus of a document. Unlike some previous work on this problem, we do not expect the document to explicitly mention the target region, making our problem one of inference or prediction, rather than one of identification. Further, we seek to tackle the problem without appealing to specialized geographic information resources like gazetteers or atlases, but employ general-purpose knowledge bases and ontologies like ConceptNet and YAGO. We propose certain natural strategies towards addressing the problem, and show that the GeoMantis system that implements these strategies outperforms an existing state-of-the-art system, when compared on documents whose target region (country, in particular) is not explicitly mentioned or is obscured. Our results give evidence that using general-purpose knowledge bases and ontologies can, in certain cases, outperform even specialized tools.