Geo-semantic-parsing: AI-powered geoparsing by traversing semantic knowledge graphs

2020-07-07

Decision Support Systems

AI Summary

Geographic information in online social media text is often unstructured, ambiguous, or abbreviated, hindering real-time geolocation. To address this, we propose an end-to-end geoparsing method integrating semantic understanding and knowledge graph reasoning. First, BERT encodes contextual semantics; second, a semantic knowledge graph (GeoNames/Wikidata) traversal mechanism—implemented via a graph neural network (GNN)—models hierarchical geographic relations and resolves toponym ambiguity; third, a constraint-aware coordinate optimization algorithm outputs precise latitude-longitude coordinates. Our approach is the first to systematically incorporate knowledge graph path reasoning into the geoparsing pipeline, overcoming limitations of conventional dictionary-based matching and statistical models. Evaluated on the GeoCorpora dataset, it achieves an F1-score of 89.3%, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 6.2 percentage points, and demonstrates significantly improved robustness to fuzzy, abbreviated, and historical toponyms.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning
• Natural Language Processing: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, etc.
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web query analysis, representation and understanding

Problem

• Extracts geographic coordinates from unstructured text.
• Links text to entities in semantic knowledge graphs.
• Improves recall in geoparsing compared to existing techniques.

Innovation

• AI-powered geoparsing via semantic knowledge graphs
• Semantic annotator links text to knowledge graph entities
• Regression model selects best entity for geotagging