Large List/DB of (Mandarin) Chinese Geographical Names and Entitites (for NER)

Question

Is there a freely available list of geographical entities, like cities, provinces (in China and abroad), names of rivers, mountains, etc.?

I am looking for something like GeoNames, but it doesn't have to be that feature rich.

I would like to use this for named-entity recognition.

Answer 1

After some research into this I found this website: http://docs.bosonnlp.com/ner.html. If you set up an account on their website, you can use their NER functionality (because you need an API Token. I tried their Python example

import json
import requests


NER_URL = 'http://api.bosonnlp.com/ner/analysis'


s = ['对于该小孩是不是郑尚金的孩子，目前已做亲子鉴定，结果还没出来，'
     '纪检部门仍在调查之中。成都商报记者 姚永忠']
data = json.dumps(s)
headers = {'X-Token': 'YOUR_API_TOKEN'}
resp = requests.post(NER_URL, headers=headers, data=data)


for item in resp.json():
    for entity in item['entity']:
        print(''.join(item['word'][entity[0]:entity[1]]), entity[2])

And got back:

郑尚金 person_name
成都商报 product_name
姚永忠 person_name

However, it seems they have a 500 daily request limit.

Doing some more research, they seem to have a publicly available list of names they use for their text comparison (The link is under 命名实体数据). That might be what you're looking for.

Answer 2

外國地名譯名

• http://data.gov.tw/node/gov/resource/9441

• Taiwan, traditional characters, csv

外国地名译名手册 / Mainland

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%96%E5%9B%BD%E5%9C%B0%E5%90%8D%E8%AF%91%E5%90%8D%E6%89%8B%E5%86%8C

• Mainland, simplified characters, but can only find scanned copies online