Abstract. Discourse may contain both named and nominal entities.
Most common nouns or nominal mentions in natural language do not have a
single, simple meaning but rather a number of related meanings. This
form of ambiguity led to the development of a task in natural language
processing known as Word Sense Disambiguation. Recognition and
categorisation of named and nominal entities is an essential step for
Word Sense Disambiguation methods. Up to now, named entity recognition
and categorisation systems mainly focused on the annotation,
categorisation and identification of named entities. This paper focuses
on the annotation and the identification of spatial nominal entities. We
explore the combination of Transfer Learning principle and supervised
learning algorithms, in order to build a system to detect spatial
nominal entities. For this purpose, different supervised learning
algorithms are evaluated with three different context sizes on two
manually annotated datasets built from Wikipedia articles and hiking
description texts. The studied algorithms have been selected for one or
more of their specific properties potentially useful in solving our
problem. The results of the first phase of experiments reveal that the
selected algorithms have similar performances in terms of ability to
detect spatial nominal entities. The study also confirms the importance
of the size of the window to describe the context, when word-embedding
principle is used to represent the semantics of each word.