Georeferencing is the process of linking an entity with a spatial footprint. For example, a linguistic sign such as the mention of a place name (e.g., Paris) can be associated with a particular place on Earth referred to. The footprint may be a polygon or a centroid given as latitude and longitude, and the benefit of such a link lies in its enablement of automatic spatial processing of the entity by computer, such as placing the entity on a map or providing a spatial search capability. Automatic georeferencing, as a method applied to textual document collections, is described as a combination of named entity recognition (“geoparsing,” i.e., recognition and classification of mentions of place names in text) and toponym resolution (i.e., disambiguation using linguistic and spatial context as well as the selection of a single, most likely intended, spatial interpretation among a set of candidates looked up in a gazetteer).