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Which Melbourne? Augmenting Geocoding with Maps

Resources accompanying the ACL 2018 long paper, presented in Melbourne, Australia.

The accepted pdf manuscript is also included in this directory (as is the .PPTX from the Melbourne presentation). The video recording of the Melbourne presentation can be found here (https://vimeo.com/285803462).

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.

Resources

This repository contains the accompanying data and source code for CamCoder (toponym resolver) described in the paper. Additional data is required as the files are too large for GitHub, please download files from https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/277772.

Dependencies

Instructions

  • Download the weights.zip and geonames.db.zip files as a minimum (optional files available from https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/277772).
  • Read the README.txt in the repository to learn about the contents.
  • Create a data folder outside the root directory to store the large files. N.B. There is already a data folder inside the root directory! This holds the small files.
  • Unzip the files into that directory, this will take up a few GBs of space.
  • For replication, use test.py and see further instructions in the code. That should run out of the box if you followed the previous instructions. If not, get in touch!
  • To tweak the model, use train.py, see comments inside the script for more info.

Use a GPU, if you can, a CPU epoch takes such a looooooong time, it's only worth it for small jobs. Contact me on ✉️ mg711 at cam dot ac dot uk ✉️ if you need any help with reproduction or some other aspect of this work at any time. After graduation, find me on Twitter/milangritta or raise an issue/ticket.

Tools

I included a couple of 'tools' for applied scientists and tinkerers in case you want to parse your own text and/or want to compare system performance with your research.

text2mapVec.py

This is a simple function buildMapVec(text) that turns text into a Map Vector i.e. extracts locations/toponyms with Spacy NER and creates the 'bag of locations' or the Map Vector as an additional feature vector to be used in a downstream task.

NOTE: The speed of execution won't be a record breaker, this is research code, I'm really busy trying to finish the PhD, sorry, I don't have time to rewrite it from scratch using proper software engineering principles. I hope you understand. Feel free to fork and edit.

geoparse.py

Unline most (maybe all) geoparsers, CamCoder can perform geotagging (NER) and geocoding separately. Use (1.) for the full pipeline and (2.) for toponym resolution only.

  1. To geocode with NER: Use geoparse(text), instructions in the code.
  2. To geocode with Oracle: This will be slightly more laborious as you will need the generate_evaluation_data(corpus, file_name) function in preprocessing.py. First, save your evaluation dataset in the format of data/lgl.txt (name,,name,,lat,,lon,,start,end) then you don't have to modify any code. I think it's the best option. Once you have generated machine-readable data with that function, you're ready to test.py the performance.

NOTE: CamCoder uses Spacy NER for Named Entity Recognition. The reported F-Scores for each model can be found here https://spacy.io/models/en, not that great and will certainly affect performance. Use Oracle NER for a scientifically adequate comparison. Oracle means you extract the entities separately with perfect fidelity, then evaluate toponym recognition in isolation. Also feel free to plug in a custom NER tagger, the code is extendable and should be well documented. Famous last words :-)