Geocoding multilingual texts: Recognition, disambiguation and visualisation

We are presenting a method to recognise geographical references in free text. Our tool must work on various languages with a mi ni-mum of language-dependent resources, except a gazetteer. The main difficulty is to disa mbiguate these place names by distinguis hing places from persons and by selecting the mo st likely place out of a list of homographi c place names world-wide. The system uses a number of language-independent clues and he uristics to disambiguate place name homogra phs. The final aim is to index texts with the countries and cities they mention and to automatically visualise this information on geographical maps using various tools.