  We are presenting a method to recognise geographical references in free text.
Our tool must work on various languages with a minimum of language-dependent
resources, except a gazetteer. The main difficulty is to disambiguate these
place names by distinguishing places from persons and by selecting the most
likely place out of a list of homographic place names world-wide. The system
uses a number of language-independent clues and heuristics to disambiguate
place name homographs. The final aim is to index texts with the countries and
cities they mention and to automatically visualise this information on
geographical maps using various tools.
