  Our method for multi-lingual geoparsing uses monolingual tools and resources
along with machine translation and alignment to return location words in many
languages. Not only does our method save the time and cost of developing
geoparsers for each language separately, but also it allows the possibility of
a wide range of language capabilities within a single interface. We evaluated
our method in our LanguageBridge prototype on location named entities using
newswire, broadcast news and telephone conversations in English, Arabic and
Chinese data from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). Our results for
geoparsing Chinese and Arabic text using our multi-lingual geoparsing method
are comparable to our results for geoparsing English text with our English
tools. Furthermore, experiments using our machine translation approach results
in accuracy comparable to results from the same data that was translated
manually.
