Simon Overell's
Publications

Saul Steinberg's most famous cartoon "View of the world from 9th Avenue" depicts the world as seen by self-absorbed New Yorkers. By analysing wikipediae of a range of different languages, we find that this particular fish-eye world view is ubiquitous and inherently part of human nature. By measuring the skew in the distribution of locations in different languages we can confirm the validity of plausible quantitative models. These models demonstrate convincingly that people all have similar world views: "We are all little Steinbergs." Our Steinberg hypothesis allows the world view of specific people to be more accurately modelled; this will allow greater understanding of a person’s discourse, either by someone else or automatically by a computer.

@article{Overell2011193,
title = "View of the world according to Wikipedia: Are we all little Steinbergs?",
journal = "Journal of Computational Science",
volume = "2",
number = "3",
pages = "193 - 197",
year = "2011",
note = "Social Computational Systems",
issn = "1877-7503",
doi = "10.1016/j.jocs.2011.05.006",
url = "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877750311000494",
author = "S.E. Overell and S. R\"uger",
keywords = "Social role identification",
keywords = "Modelling",
keywords = "Data Mining"
}

This paper describes the generation of a model capturing information on how placenames co-occur together. The advantages of the co-occurrence model over traditional gazetteers are discussed and the problem of placename disambiguation is presented as a case study. We begin by outlining the problem of ambiguous placenames. We demonstrate how analysis of Wikipedia can be used in the generation of a co-occurrence model. The accuracy of our model is compared to a handcrafted ground truth; then we evaluate alternative methods of applying this model to the disambiguation of placenames in free text (using the GeoCLEF evaluation forum). We conclude by showing how the inclusion of placenames in both the text and geographic parts of a query provides the maximum mean average precision and outline the benefits of a co-occurrence model as a data source for the wider field of geographic information retrieval (GIR).

@article{overell08a,
title={Using co-occurrence models for placename disambiguation.},
author={Simon Overell and Stefan R\"uger},
year={2008},
volume={22},
issue={3},
journal={International Journal of Geographical Information Science},
pages={265--287}
}