EUPEG: Towards an extensible and unified platform for evaluating geoparsers

from unstructured texts, is a critical task in geographic information retrieval (GIR). While a number of geoparsers have been developed, they were often tested on different datasets using different performance metrics. Consequently, it is difficult to compare multiple geoparsers directly. In recent years, open corpora with human annotations have been developed and shared by researchers. However, much effort is still needed for implementing and applying previous geoparsers to these annotated corpora or to rehydrate certain datasets (e.g., tweets) due to data sharing restrictions. This short paper presents the early work of EUPEG: an Extensible and Unified Platform for Evaluating Geoparsers. EUPEG is an open-source and Web-based platform which incorporates existing geoparsers and hosts a set of annotated corpora. A newly developed geoparser can be connected to EUPEG and compared with other geoparsers based on the hosted datasets. The objectives of EUPEG are to enable systematic comparison of geoparsers across datasets and to reduce the amount of time and effort that researchers have to spend in implementing previous geoparsers as baselines.