Disambiguating Explicit and Implicit Geographic References in Natural Language

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.

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