Gazetteer Linkage to WordNet

One of the new WordNet features to be found in version 2.1 is the instance relation, which replaces the hypernym relation for noun synsets that denote instances rather than types (Miller and Hristea, forthcoming). The creation of this distinction serendipitously coincided with project work at SPAWAR Systems Center (SSC) and the MITRE Corporation to produce a tailored gazetteer database of place names for use in research on question answering by participants in a U.S. government-sponsored research program (Irie and Sundheim 2004). The millions of place names contained in this database, called the Integrated Gazetteer Database (IGDB) (Mardis and Burger), are drawn from publicly available sources provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, the CIA World Factbook, and the Tipster Text research program. The IGDB project includes a task that is being carried out in collaboration with Princeton University to incorporate the instance synsets that define places into the database as an additional source of gazetteer information.