Work

Geolocating News about Extreme Climate Events: A Comparative Analysis of Off-the-Shelf Tools for Toponym Identification in German

Year: 2026

Type: preprint

Abstract: Determining the geolocation of extreme climate events and disasters in texts is a common problem in climate impact and adaptation research. Named-entity recognition (NER) tools are typically used to identify a pool of toponyms that serve as candidate event locations. In this study, we conduct a comparative analysis of three off-the-shelf NER tools, namely Flair, Spacy and Stanza. We describe and quantify differences between their outputs for German news articles and evaluate them extrinsically based on three methods to determine the country where events took place. We show how their contrasts are propagated into downstream tasks and can yield distinct decisions about a document's geographical focus, which, in turn, can impact conclusions about countries' prominence in German media.

Source: arXiv (Cornell University)

DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.03414

Authors: Madureira, Brielen, de Brito, Mariana Madruga, Niekler, Andreas

Institutions: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig University of Applied Sciences, Leipzig University

Language: English

Topic: Topic Modeling

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W7160376684

Cites:

Cited by:

Related to: 10