Handling Uncertain and Ambiguous Spatial Expressions in Text Using Fuzzy Logic

The knowledge era, as this era is called, poses the challenge of churning knowledge from the pool of information available from various sources. Much of the text documents acting as an information source and the query posed by the user implicitly have a geographic or spatial reference component present in it. This logically leads to the conclusion by the previous studies that more than 80% of the searches are pertaining to geographic locations. Text documents imply the usage of natural language and as such it yields to explicit vague fuzzy descriptions involving linguistic terms such as near to, far from, to the east of, very close and also implicit vague spatial references. Any text document which contains physical location specifications such as place names, geographic coordinates, landmarks, country names etc., are supposed to contain the spatial information. Fuzzy logic is an extension to the Boolean crisp logic toaccommodate for the fuzziness of an element belonging to a set. The understanding and extraction of spatial components is a primal area of study not only in the field of information retrieval but also invarious other fields such as Robotics, Psychology, Geosciences, Geography, Political Sciences, Geographic Economy, Environmental, Mining and Petroleum Engineering, Natural Resources, Epidemiology,Demography etc., Given a query involving events, the aim of this ongoing research work is to extract both the explicit and implicit spatial references from the text documents using fuzzy logic techniques.