Creative use of the Named Entity Recognition techniques

Even the basic techniques from the computational linguistics field can make for interesting and intriguing applications. Gutenkarte takes public domain books, extract geographic names present in the text and plots them on the map. The result is an automatic clustering of place references, both visually and (within single click) textually.

The site itself is self-explanatory, but there is a good write up on the larger context of the idea in the if:book blog entry.