Person: Keller, Mikaela
Loading...
Email Address
AA Acceptance Date
Birth Date
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Job Title
Last Name
Keller
First Name
Mikaela
Name
Keller, Mikaela
1 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Publication Automated Vocabulary Discovery for Geo-Parsing Online Epidemic Intelligence(BioMed Central, 2009) Keller, Mikaela; Freifeld, Clark C; Brownstein, JohnBackground Automated surveillance of the Internet provides a timely and sensitive method for alerting on global emerging infectious disease threats. HealthMap is part of a new generation of online systems designed to monitor and visualize, on a real-time basis, disease outbreak alerts as reported by online news media and public health sources. HealthMap is of specific interest for national and international public health organizations and international travelers. A particular task that makes such a surveillance useful is the automated discovery of the geographic references contained in the retrieved outbreak alerts. This task is sometimes referred to as "geo-parsing". A typical approach to geo-parsing would demand an expensive training corpus of alerts manually tagged by a human.Results Given that human readers perform this kind of task by using both their lexical and contextual knowledge, we developed an approach which relies on a relatively small expert-built gazetteer, thus limiting the need of human input, but focuses on learning the context in which geographic references appear. We show in a set of experiments, that this approach exhibits a substantial capacity to discover geographic locations outside of its initial lexicon.Conclusion The results of this analysis provide a framework for future automated global surveillance efforts that reduce manual input and improve timeliness of reporting.