Dataset for Toponym Resolution in Nineteenth-Century English Newspapers

We present a new dataset (version 2) for the task of toponym resolution in digitised historical newspapers in English. It consists of 455 annotated articles from newspapers based in four different locations in England (Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Poole and Dorchester), published between 1780 and 1870. The articles have been manually annotated with mentions of places, which are linked---whenever possible---to their corresponding entry on Wikipedia. The dataset is published on the British Library shared research repository, and is especially of interest to researchers working on improving semantic access to historical newspaper content.

We share the 455 annotated files (one file per article) in the WebAnno TSV file format version 3.2, a CoNLL-based file format. The files are split into a train and test set (343 and 112 files respectively). For each split, we additionally provide a TSV file with metadata at the article level. We also provide the original annotation guidelines.