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Show HN: Open-source text-to-geolocation models

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Re: Show HN: Open-source text-to-geolocation models

#5

Depending upon your use-case, you can get pretty good results by using spaCy for named entity recognition then matching on the titles of Wikipedia articles that have coördinates.

Tried this in the past, it's too limited... There are too many ways certain locations can be referred to. Take: New York City, NYC, NY, New York, NYCity, so on...

Re: Show HN: Open-source text-to-geolocation models

#6
There are no weights and no data, only some code to create a pytorch character based network and train it. Will you provide weights or data in the future? Do you have any benchmark over Nominatim or Google maps?

I think something like this (but with more substance) could be helpful for some people, especially in the social sciences.

Re: Show HN: Open-source text-to-geolocation models

#7
post #6

There are no weights and no data, only some code to create a pytorch character based network and train it. Will you provide weights or data in the future? Do you have any benchmark over Nominatim or Google maps? I think something like this (but with more substance) could be helpful for some people, especially in the social sciences.

Yea, I was expecting a general-purpose model or dataset to train a model. The idea is great, but - as it currently stands - of no use to most people.

Re: Show HN: Open-source text-to-geolocation models

#9
post #5

Depending upon your use-case, you can get pretty good results by using spaCy for named entity recognition then matching on the titles of Wikipedia articles that have coördinates.

Tried this in the past, it's too limited... There are too many ways certain locations can be referred to. Take: New York City, NYC, NY, New York, NYCity, so on...

Wikipedia handles “New York City” and “NYC” as intended. “NY” and “New York” are ambiguous to both machines and humans (are you referring to the city or the state?) and if you have a resolution strategy for this then Wikipedia gives you the options to disambiguate. I’ve never seen “NYCity” used by anybody.

Re: Show HN: Open-source text-to-geolocation models

#10
This is _really_ cool. Early in the pandemic I released a local news aggregation tool that aimed to aggregate COVID-related content and score it for relevance using an ensemble of ML classification models, including one that would attempt to infer an article's geographic coordinates. Accuracy peaked at about ~70-80%, which was just not quite high enough for this use case. With a large enough dataset of geotagged documents I'm pretty sure we could've improved that by another 10-15% which would've likely been "good enough" for our purposes. But one of the surprising things I took away from the project was that there's not a well-defined label for this category of classification problems, and as a result there's few datasets or benchmarks to encourage progress.
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