Project: Language based Entity Identification for Location Aware Services

Spatially aware systems available nowadays already proved to be able to change citizens life in a number of ways (GPS, car navigation systems, mobile devices such as digital camera with GPS, etc.). In recent years they also became available as web services and web applications oriented towards both to a business and customer audience (Viamichelin, Mapppy, Google maps, Yellow pages, etc.). However, there is still a huge gap to fill for connecting the core of the web with spatially aware applications, namely the fact that the backbone of the web is still based on pages written in *human language* and place names, addresses, points of interested, etc. are contained in those pages as *manually written text*. LEILAS proposes to fill this gap by performing research on identification and georeferentiation of geographical named entities (mentions of places) as they appear in texts written by humans. In its purest form LEILAS will deliver algorithms that, given a text, will “annotate” every mention of a place, an address, a point of interest with the exact spatial coordinates. The outcome of this research will be integrated in a set of services/portals which will drive standard web users towards a navigation experience enriched with spatial localization._x000D__x000D_In LEILAS, innovation is represented by the fine tuning natural language processing and semantic technologies for the identification of geographical named entities in texts, together with their integration with geographical information system for increasing precision in the identification and localization phases. LEILAS will also propose a set of innovative services that take advantage from the possibilities offered by Web 2.0 and propose new and exciting ways of perceiving information both to the business and home community:_x000D__x000D_· The myPlaces portal, where the user indicates a set of web pages of her choice and the portal offers the possibility to “manipulate” the geographical references contained in those pages (e.g. trip planning, tourism guide generation, automatic linking to web annuaries such as web yellow pages, hyperlinking to repositories of information such as wikipedia, etc.)_x000D_· The NeTourist portal, a search engine COly ranging on tourisms, specially conceived to take advantage from georeferentiation of places in documents. It will offer services such as map based result hits, geographically based proximity search, itinerary constrained hits caching, etc_x000D_· The MyBiz portal where the user can find a set of business information regarding a specific geographical area such local productions, local specialization, unemployment rate, funding opportunities for entrepreneurs etc. These services will be also integrated with the news regarding a specific geographical area.._x000D_· The NELocalize service, a B2B web services offered to web site administrators to provide geo-localization facilities to people accessing their web sites. On the long run, the service could evolve into a service offered to big content aggregators._x000D_ All portals B2C portals will additionally offer translation services to increase cross-language comprehension, which is fundamental in doCOs such as Tourism and Finance._x000D__x000D_ These prototypes will be the basis for commercial exploitation of the scientific results of the project._x000D__x000D_Because of the need to integrate technologies which are present in different countries and to deal with different languages, the consortium is necessarily cross national, cross language and cross cultural. Multilinguism will also play a crucial role in market penetration as it will confer a Europe-wide impact to the exploitation policies. _x000D_The consortium lists the following members:_x000D__x000D_France:_x000D_· CELI FRANCE: A SME in the Natural Language Processing market with the CO task of providing recognition technology for French and Italian_x000D_· OBJET DIRECT: A SME in the business of internet based services and software development, with the CO goals of supporting georeferentiation, visualization and portals set up_x000D__x000D_Germany:_x000D_· LINGENIO: a SME in the field of machine translation, with the CO goal of providing recognition technology for Spanish, as well as translation services for all the B2C portals._x000D_· DFKI: the German center of excellence in Artificial Intelligence, with the CO goal of providing recognition technology for German and English_x000D__x000D_Italy:_x000D_· GONETWORK: a SME in the business of portal development, B2C internet services, internet advertisement and Search Engine Optimization, with the CO goal of setting up the web portals and planning B2C exploitation._x000D_· EUROKLEIS: a SME in the business of B2B services with special attention to financial services and localization services._x000D__x000D_

Acronym	LEILAS (Reference Number: 4717)
Duration	01/04/2011 - 31/03/2013
Project Topic	LEILAS proposes to develop applied research on geographical named entities identification and normalization. The project will deliver a technology by which references to geographical entities (towns, addresses...) in web documents will be automatically recognized and assigned spatial coordinates.
Project Results (after finalisation)	-A web service able to take as input a text and identifying geographical named entities (NE) present in the text. Besides that the service performs geo-localization of NEs, i.e. it is able to attach geographical coordinates to them._x000D_- The service has ben plugged in into a number of application portals, notably the one of AEPI to provide public managers a better understanding of the evolution of company installation on the territory.
Network	Eurostars
Call	Eurostars Cut-Off 2

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
7	CELI FRANCE SAS	Coordinator	France
7	CELI s.r.l.	Partner	Italy
7	EUROKLEIS s.r.l	Partner	Italy
7	Gonetwork srl	Observer	Italy
7	Language Technology Lab (LT) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)	Partner	Germany
7	Lingenio GmbH	Partner	Germany
7	Objet Diret SA	Partner	France