An Overview of a News Map System for Local News in Newspapers

This paper describes a system that shows places on maps, where crimes and/or accidents occur, named LonMaps. A number of news articles on local news are published in newspapers, since such local news are interested in a sense of daily life. In order to realize the system, three information items are extracted from news articles, which are incidents, places and dates. A thesaurus is utilized to extract incidents, which consists of legal terms and daily terms with respect to incidents and law. Moreover, places and dates are extracted based on patterns for describing them in news articles. In the description of many articles, similar sentence patterns are used.