Nicolae Milescu’s Northern Asia.
An e-encyclopaedic, computational & GIS reconstruction
(e-NMNA)
(55th Meeting, 2012)
[Project description]
(e-NMNA) would be a three-year research proposal aiming to develop a new web GIS platform, highly adaptable for automatic detection of historical locations and to bring the temporal data into writers’ work. In particular, the project aims to reconstruct Nicolae Milescu’s journey in Northern Asia virtually, by employing advanced geo-visualization tools capable to reproduce both the locations and temporal dimension of data, (semi)automated textual analyses – through computational linguistics – and natural language processing (NLP) tools. Thus our application will integrate geographic information (GIS) and cartographic and encyclopedic data. We propose to develop novel NLP techniques as well as to make use of existing ones in combination with intelligent learning algorithms to perform a comprehensive analysis of various content sources, in particular those available in electronic libraries and on the Internet. The major objective of this project is to combine, systematize and order, through a complex web application, qualitative and quantitative information generated by the interaction among three disciplines: NLP, GIS and history, more precisely, the encyclopedic information in Nicolae Milescu’s description of Northern Asia. The project will design and create a web application which encapsulates novel data/text mining and NLP based approaches, combined with advanced geo-visualization and analysis tools for the processing and displaying of maps. The proposed concepts and algorithms will largely be language independent and will be evaluated on different European languages by adapting relevant dictionaries, repositories, or training models in the case of more advanced learner frameworks.