Geographic Named Entity Recognition and Disambiguation in Mexican News using Word Embeddings

Abstract In recent years, dense word embeddings for text representation have been widely used since they can model complex semantic and morphological characteristics of language, such as meaning in specific contexts and applications. Contrary to sparse representations, such as one-hot encoding or frequencies, word embeddings provide computational advantages and improvements on the results in many natural language processing tasks, similar to the automatic extraction of geospatial information. Computer systems capable of discovering geographic information from natural language involve a complex process called geoparsing. In this work, we explore the use of word embeddings for two NLP tasks: Geographic Named Entity Recognition and Geographic Entity Disambiguation, both as an effort to develop the first Mexican Geoparser. Our study shows that relationships between geographic and semantic spaces arise when we apply word embedding models over a corpus of documents in Mexican Spanish. Our models achieved high accuracy for geographic named entity recognition in Spanish.