# Geolocating News about Extreme Climate Events: A Comparative Analysis of Off-the-Shelf Tools for Toponym Identification in German

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03414/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [A Dataset of German Legal Documents for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13016/) (2020)
- [A Pragmatic Guide to Geoparsing Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.12368/) (2018)
- [Location reference recognition from texts: A survey and comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.01683/) (2022)
- [Enhancing spatial and textual analysis with EUPEG: an extensible and unified platform for evaluating geoparsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.04524/) (2020)
- [Lost in Space: Geolocation in Event Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04837/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [The Newsworthiness of Brazilian Distress: A Peak Analysis on Time Series of International Media Attention to Disasters in Brazil](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04552/) (2026)
- [GeoRisk-RAG: A Hierarchy-Aware Risk Framework for Improving RAG Reliability through Selective Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22634/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Determining the geolocation of extreme climate events and disasters in texts is a common problem in climate impact and adaptation research. Named-entity recognition (NER) tools are typically used to identify a pool of toponyms that serve as candidate event locations. In this study, we conduct a comparative analysis of three off-the-shelf NER tools, namely Flair, Spacy and Stanza. We describe and quantify differences between their outputs for German news articles and evaluate them extrinsically based on three methods to determine the country where events took place. We show how their contrasts are propagated into downstream tasks and can yield distinct decisions about a document's geographical focus, which, in turn, can impact conclusions about countries' prominence in German media.