Which Melbourne? Augmenting Geocoding with Maps

Milan Gritta, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Nigel Collier


Abstract
The purpose of text geolocation is to associate geographic information contained in a document with a set (or sets) of coordinates, either implicitly by using linguistic features and/or explicitly by using geographic metadata combined with heuristics. We introduce a geocoder (location mention disambiguator) that achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on three diverse datasets by exploiting the implicit lexical clues. Moreover, we propose a new method for systematic encoding of geographic metadata to generate two distinct views of the same text. To that end, we introduce the Map Vector (MapVec), a sparse representation obtained by plotting prior geographic probabilities, derived from population figures, on a World Map. We then integrate the implicit (language) and explicit (map) features to significantly improve a range of metrics. We also introduce an open-source dataset for geoparsing of news events covering global disease outbreaks and epidemics to help future evaluation in geoparsing.
Anthology ID:
P18-1119
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1285–1296
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1119
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1119
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Milan Gritta, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, and Nigel Collier. 2018. Which Melbourne? Augmenting Geocoding with Maps. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1285–1296, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Which Melbourne? Augmenting Geocoding with Maps (Gritta et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/P18-1119.pdf
Presentation:
 P18-1119.Presentation.pdf
Notes:
 P18-1119.Notes.txt
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/285803462