Toponym Resolution in discourse

Toponym resolution involves two stages: toponym recognition and reference resolution. The present research proposes an integrative model for the resolution of Chinese toponym reference in discourse. The model employs the concept of cognitive salience, an inherent property of toponym references, to integrate different heuristic reference disambiguation methods into a coherent design. The heuristic methods involved in the model are category salience, geographic distance salience, co-occurrence frequency salience and discourse distance salience. An algorithm is also designed and implemented to evaluate the performance of the model. The evaluation is focused on the resolution of Chinese toponyms within the linguistic unit of discourse. Experiments of evaluation report satisfactory results with a best precision of 91.1% and a best recall of 73.6% for reference resolution.