Tagging Location Phrases in Text

For over 30 years researchers have studied the problem of automatically detecting named entities in written language. Throughout this time the majority of such work has focused on detection and classification of entities into coarse-grained types like: PERSON, ORGANIZATION, and LOCATION. Less attention has been focused on non-named mentions of entities, including non-named location phrases. In this work we describe the Location Phrase Detection task. Our key accomplishments include: developing a sequential tagging approach; crafting annotation guidelines; building an annotated dataset from news articles; and, conducting experiments in automated detection of location phrases with both statistical and neural taggers.