SemEval-2019 Task 12: Toponym Resolution in Scientific Papers Davy Weissenbachery, Arjun Maggez, Karen O’Connory, Matthew Scotchz, Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandezy yDBEI, The Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA zBiodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA yfdweissen, karoc,
[email protected] zfamaggera,
[email protected] Abstract Disambiguation of toponyms is a more recent task (Leidner, 2007). We present the SemEval-2019 Task 12 which With the growth of the internet, the public adop- focuses on toponym resolution in scientific ar- ticles. Given an article from PubMed, the tion of smartphones equipped with Geographic In- task consists of detecting mentions of names formation Systems and the collaborative devel- of places, or toponyms, and mapping the opment of comprehensive maps and geographi- mentions to their corresponding entries in cal databases, toponym resolution has seen an im- GeoNames.org, a database of geospatial loca- portant gain of interest in the last two decades. tions. We proposed three subtasks. In Sub- Not only academic but also commercial and open task 1, we asked participants to detect all to- source toponym resolvers are now available. How- ponyms in an article. In Subtask 2, given to- ponym mentions as input, we asked partici- ever, their performance varies greatly when ap- pants to disambiguate them by linking them plied on corpora of different genres and domains to entries in GeoNames. In Subtask 3, we (Gritta et al., 2018). Toponym disambiguation asked participants to perform both the de- tackles ambiguities between different toponyms, tection and the disambiguation steps for all like Manchester, NH, USA vs.