Disambiguating Explicit and Implicit Geographic References in Natural Language: When people speak, both they and their utterances are situated in place and time. Our utterances reflect where we are from, where we are right now, and where we are talking about—among many other things, including personality, social status, and the topics under discussion. As hearers, we naturally incorporate locational awareness into our understanding of what we are told. That is to say, we geographically ground the meaning of natural language utterances. In this talk, I will discuss both toponym resolution (e.g., identifying which Springfield is intended in a passage) and general text geolocation—deriving geographical gists from free-running text that perhaps has no explicit mentions of places. I’ll cover supervised and semi-supervised methods for solving these tasks. I’ll also briefly discuss how this work might generalize the now commonplace treatment of words-as-vectors into computational models of word meaning that use multi-dimensional representations over words, geography, time, and images.
Jason Baldridge, Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin at MLconf SEA - 5/20/16
1. Disambiguating Explicit and
Implicit Geographic References
in Natural Language
Jason Baldridge
@jasonbaldridge
Computational Linguistics Lab
Department of Linguistics
UT Austin
MLConf Seattle May 20, 2016
82. This research was sponsored by:
Grant from the
Morris Memorial Trust Fund
- Walt Whitman, A Song of the Rolling Earth (in Leaves of Grass)
Final note:Whitman had it right many years ago!
Thanks!
83. Code and Data
- Textgrounder: https://github.com/utcompling/textgrounder
Publications
- Benjamin Wing and Jason Baldridge. 2011. Simple supervised document geolocation
with geodesic grids. In Proceedings of ACL HLT 2011.
- Stephen Roller, Mike Speriosu, Sarat Rallapalli, Benjamin Wing and Jason Baldridge. 2012.
Supervised Text-based Geolocation Using Language Models on an Adaptive Grid. EMNLP
2012. Jeju, Korea.
- Benjamin Wing and Jason Baldridge 2014. Hierarchical Discriminative Classification for
Text-Based Geolocation. EMNLP 2014.
Document geolocation
84. Code and data
- Fieldspring: https://github.com/utcompling/fieldspring
- TopoCluster: https://github.com/grantdelozier/TopoCluster
Publications
- Mike Speriosu and Jason Baldridge. 2013.Text-Driven Toponym Resolution using Indirect
Supervision.ACL 2013.
- Grant DeLozier, Jason Baldridge, and Loretta London. 2015. Gazetteer-Free Toponym
Resolution Using Geographic Word Profiles.AAAI 2015.
Toponym resolution