Coordinates from Context: Using LLMs to Ground Complex Location References

Tessa Masis, Brendan O'Connor


Abstract
Geocoding is the task of linking a location reference to an actual geographic location and is essential for many downstream analyses of unstructured text. In this paper, we explore the challenging setting of geocoding compositional location references. Building on recent work demonstrating LLMs’ abilities to reason over geospatial data, we evaluate LLMs’ geospatial knowledge versus reasoning skills relevant to our task. Based on these insights, we propose an LLM-based strategy for geocoding compositional location references. We show that our approach improves performance for the task and that a relatively small fine-tuned LLM can achieve comparable performance with much larger off-the-shelf models.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-long.74
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1591–1606
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.74/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tessa Masis and Brendan O'Connor. 2026. Coordinates from Context: Using LLMs to Ground Complex Location References. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1591–1606, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Coordinates from Context: Using LLMs to Ground Complex Location References (Masis & O’Connor, EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-long.74.pdf