Extracting meeting location from seminar and conference announcement in English

Living in the age of information people face problems related to information overload. Information is easy to produce, store and distribute through various communication channels, one of which is emails. With the appearance of the mobile devices, such as smart phones and tabs, people can have access to email inbox at any moment of time from everywhere. In this paper we present information extraction system with a specific goal of extracting meeting location from the announcement of seminar or conference. We apply a machine learning method (conditional random fields, CRF), train the system using annotated corpus of seminar and conference announcements and validate results by applying various extracted correction rules and patterns. Furthermore, we normalize extracted location, and reference using geo-coding databases, OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia resources to determine real geographical coordinates.