Abstract
Word embedding methods have become the de-facto way to represent words, having been successfully applied to a wide array of natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that embedding methods can also be effectively used to represent spatial locations. Using a new dataset consisting of the location trajectories of 729 students over a seven month period and text data related to those locations, we implement several strategies to create location embeddings, which we then use to create embeddings of the sequences of locations a student has visited. To identify the surface level properties captured in the representations, we propose a number of probing tasks such as the presence of a specific location in a sequence or the type of activities that take place at a location. We then leverage the representations we generated and employ them in more complex downstream tasks ranging from predicting a student’s area of study to a student’s depression level, showing the effectiveness of these location embeddings.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.aacl-main.44
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Suzhou, China
- Venue:
- AACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 425–434
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.aacl-main.44
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Laura Biester, Carmen Banea, and Rada Mihalcea. 2020. Building Location Embeddings from Physical Trajectories and Textual Representations. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 425–434, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Building Location Embeddings from Physical Trajectories and Textual Representations (Biester et al., AACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/remove-xml-comments/2020.aacl-main.44.pdf