Newsmap: semi-supervised approach to geographical news classification

This paper presents the results of an evaluation of three different types to geographical news classification methods: (1) simple keyword matching, a popular method in media and communications research; (2) geographical information extraction systems equipped with named-entity recognition and place name disambiguation mechanisms (Open Calais and Geoparser.io); (3) semi-supervised machine learning classifier developed by the author (Newsmap). Newsmap substitutes manual coding of news stories with dictionarybased labelling in creation of large training sets to extracts large number of geographical words without human involvement, and it also identifies multi-word names to reduce the ambiguity of the geographical traits fully automatically. The evaluation of classification accuracy of the three types of methods against 5,000 human-coded news summaries reveals that Newsmap outperforms the geographical information extraction systems in overall accuracy, while the simple keyword matching suffers from ambiguity of place names in countries with ambiguous place names.