There are two phases in our planned work in place name
reference (PNR) analysis. Phase I, which we present here,
involves the manual annotation of PNRs in natural language text, and quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results. In Phase II we expect to invest a significant portion of our effort on incorporating standard machine learning techniques to perform automatic annotation. The Phase I goals are to develop software and procedural resources to aid in the manual annotation task, and to analyze annotations to determine the nature and extent of the PNR ambiguity problem.