Jason Baldridge, Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin at MLconf SEA - 5/20/16

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

© 2016 Jason M Baldridge MLConf, May 2016
What does “barbecue” mean?
2

What does “barbecue” mean? Barbecue’
2

What I thought semantics was before 2005
3
From: John Enrico and Jason Baldridge. 2011. Possessor Raising, Demonstrative Raising, Quantiﬁer
Float and Number Float in Haida. International Journal of American Linguistics. 77(2):185-218

Updated perspective a la Ray Mooney (UT Austin CS)
4
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ml/slides/chen-icml08.ppt

http://www.lib.utexas.edu/books/travel/index.htmlTravel at the Turn of the 20th Century
5

Motivation: Google Lit Trips [http://www.googlelittrips.com/]
6
Grapes of Wrath in Google Earth
Text
http://www.googlelittrips.com/GoogleLit/9-12/Entries/2006/11/1_The_Grapes_of_Wrath_by_John_Steinbeck.html

Look, Mom, no hands! (Err, um... no metadata.)
7

Look, Mom, no hands! (Err, um... no metadata.)
7
Topics with a clear, circumscribed
geographic focus emerge!

Metadata is now plentiful
8

01:55:55 RT @USER_dc5e5498: Drop and give me 50....
05:09:29 I said u got a swisher from redmond!? He said nah kirkland!
Lol..ooooooooOkay!
05:57:35 Lmao!:) havin a good ol time after work! Unexpected! #goodtimes
06:00:09 RT @USER_d5d93fec: #letsbereal .. No seriously, #letsbereal>>lol.
Don't start.
06:00:37 On my way to get @USER_60939380 yeee! She want some of this
strawberry! Sexy!
...
47°31’41’’ N 122°11’52’’ W
9
Geotagged Twitter

Geotagged Wikipedia
10
30° 17′ N 97° 44′ W

Where’s a word on Earth? (according to Wikipedia)

Where’s a word on Earth? (according to Wikipedia)
mountain

Document geolocation: where is this person?
12

Amsterdam, Zaandam,Amstelveen, Diemen, Landsmeer ...
Frankfurt, Frechen, Hürth, Brühl,Wesseling, ...
Language modeling approach
Wing & Baldridge 2011: Simple supervised document geolocation with geodesic grids.

Locations of Twitter users are not uniformly distributed!
14
(Small) GeoUT (Twitter) plotted
on Google Earth, one pin per user.
Density of (all)
documents in GeoUT
over the USA
(390 million tweets)

k-d tree for geotagged Wikipedia, looking at N. America
15
Roller, Speriosu, Rallapalli,Wing & Baldridge 2014:
Supervised Text-based Geolocation Using Language Models on an Adaptive Grid.

[Serdyukov, Murdock, & van Zwol 2009; Cheng, Caverlee, & Lee 2010;Wing & Baldridge 2011]
Automatic document geolocation

Hierarchical geo-location with logistic regression
17
Wing & Baldridge 2014: Hierarchical Discriminative Classiﬁcation for Text-Based Geolocation.

© 2016 Jason M Baldridge MLConf May 2016
Hierarchical logistic regression
18

19

20

Performance: hierarchical logistic regression with kd-tree grid
21
Flickr (entire world)
Half of documents geotagged within 18 km of truth
Percent of documents within 166km (100 miles): 66%
Twitter (World)
Half of users geotagged within 510 km of truth
Twitter (USA)
Half of users geotagged within 192 km of truth

Hierarchical logistic regression beats ﬂat naive Bayes
22
Naive Bayes Hierarchical LR
Twitter USA 36.2 48.0
Twitter World 28.7 31.3
Flickr 58.5 66
English Wikipedia 84.5 88.9
German Wikipedia 89.3 90.2
Portuguese Wikipedia 77.1 89.5
Accuracy @ 161 km, kd-tree grid

Logistic regression weights good features heavily
23

Automated Lit Trips
24

Toponym (place name) resolution
25
They visit Portland every year.

Toponym (place name) resolution
25
They visit Portland every year.
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
Which Portland? (Also: Canada,Australia, Ireland...)

Toponym resolution in context
26
Although Elisha Newman made the ﬁrst land entry in the township of Portland (June,
1833), he did not become a settler until three years later, by which time a few settlers had
located in the town. From Mr. Newman's story, it appears that early in 1833, he was
visiting friends in Ann Arbor, and during an evening conversation discussed with others
the subject of unlocated lands lying west of Ann Arbor. One of the company (Joseph
Wood) remarked that he had been out with the party sent to survey Ionia and other
counties, and that the surveyors were struck by the valuable water-power at the mouth of
the Looking Glass River, saying there would surely be a village there some day.
Mr. Newman was at once taken with the idea of locating lands at the mouth of the Looking
Glass. Following up his impulse, he made ready to start at once, and, accompanied by
James Newman and Joseph Wood, went out to the Looking Glass on a tour of inspection.
Being satisﬁed with the location, he returned Eastward with his companions, and at White
Pigeon made his land entry.
Newman did not return for a permanent settlement until the spring of 1836, and
meanwhile, in November, 1833, Philo Bogue bought a piece of land on section 28, in the
bend of the Grand River, where he proposed to set up a trading post. Unaided he rolled up
a log cabin near where the Detroit, Lansing, and Northern depot was located, and when he
brought the house into decent shape went over to Hunt's at Lyons for his family, whom he
had left there against such time as he should have affairs prepared for their comfort.

Spatial minimality
27
Although Elisha Newman made the ﬁrst land entry in the township of Portland (June, 1833), he did not become a settler until three years later, by
which time a few settlers had located in the town. From Mr. Newman's story, it appears that early in 1833, he was visiting friends in Ann Arbor,
and during an evening conversation discussed with others the subject of unlocated lands lying west of Ann Arbor. One of the company (Joseph
Wood) remarked that he had been out with the party sent to survey Ionia and other counties, and that the surveyors were struck by the valuable
water-power at the mouth of the Looking Glass River, saying there would surely be a village there some day.
Mr. Newman was at once taken with the idea of locating lands at the mouth of the Looking Glass. Following up his impulse, he made ready to start
at once, and, accompanied by James Newman and Joseph Wood, went out to the Looking Glass on a tour of inspection. Being satisﬁed with the
location, he returned Eastward with his companions, and at White Pigeon made his land entry.
Newman did not return for a permanent settlement until the spring of 1836, and meanwhile, in November, 1833, Philo Bogue bought a piece of
land on section 28, in the bend of the Grand River, where he proposed to set up a trading post. Unaided he rolled up a log cabin near where the
Detroit, Lansing, and Northern depot was located, and when he brought the house into decent shape went over to Hunt's at Lyons for his family,
whom he had left there against such time as he should have affairs prepared for their comfort.

GeoNames
4048392 Portland Mills Portland Mills 39.7781 -87.00918 P PPL US IN 133 0 223 218 America/Indiana/Indianapolis 2010-02-15
4084605 Portland Portland 32.15459 -87.1686 P PPL US AL 047 0 30 41 America/Chicago 2006-01-15
4127143 Portland Portland Portlend,Портленд33.2379 -91.51151 P PPL US AR 003 430 38 39 America/Chicago 2011-05-14
4169227 Portland Portland 30.51242 -86.19578 P PPL US FL 131 0 8 14 America/Chicago 2006-01-15
4217115 Portland Portland 34.05732 -85.03634 P PPL US GA 233 0 229 228 America/New_York 2010-09-05
4277586 Portland Portland 37.0778 -97.31227 P PPL US KS 191 0 362 364 America/Chicago 2006-01-15
4305000 Portland Portland 37.12062 -85.44608 P PPL US KY 001 0 220 223 America/Chicago 2006-01-15
4305001 Portland Portland 38.26924 -85.8108 P PPL US KY 111 0 135 138 America/Kentucky/Louisville 2006-01-15
4305002 Portland Portland 38.74812 -84.44772 P PPL US KY 191 0 265 266 America/New_York 2006-01-15
404289 Portland Portland Portlend,Портленд38.71088 -91.71767 P PPL US MO 027 0 170 172 America/Chicago 2010-01-29
4521811 Portland Portland Portlend,Портленд39.00341 -81.77124 P PPL US OH 105 0 187 188 America/New_York 2010-01-29
4650946 Portland Portland Portlend,Портленд36.58171 -86.51638 P PPL US TN 165 11480 244 245 America/Chicago 2011-05-14
4720131 Portland Portland Portlend,Портленд27.87725 -97.32388 P PPL US TX 409 15099 13 11 America/Chicago 2011-05-14
4841001 Portland Portland Portlend,Портленд41.57288 -72.64065 P PPL US CT 007 5862 24 27 America/New_York 2011-05-14
4871855 Portland Portland 43.12858 -93.12354 P PPL US IA 033 35 327 330 America/Chicago 2011-05-14
4906524 Portland Portland 41.66253 -89.98012 P PPL US IL 195 0 190 190 America/Chicago 2006-01-15
5006314 Portland Portland Portlend,Портленд42.8692 -84.90305 P PPL US MI 067 3883 221 223 America/Detroit 2011-05-14
5746545 Portland Portland 45.52345 -122.67621 P PPLA2 US OR 051 583776 12 15 America/Los_Angeles 2011-05-14
Spatial minimality
27

GeoNames
Spatial minimality
27
Ann Arbor
Detroit
Ionia
Lyons
Portland
White Pigeon
1
>7
>4
>15
>17
1
# LocationsToponym

GeoNames
Spatial minimality
27
Portland
LyonsIonia
White Pigeon
Ann Arbor
Detroit
Ionia
Lyons
Portland
White Pigeon
1
>7
>4
>15
>17
1
# LocationsToponym

Spatial minimality often fails
28
I moved from Encinitas, CA, a nice beach town in North San Diego County to Asheville, NC.
By far, Ashville is more hip, especially West Asheville. Asheville has a lot in common with
Portland. Austin, I've never been to so I cannot comment. But what makes a place cool and
hip, in my opinion are that give a area "punch". There are a lot of ingredients. One is geography.
Add a college or university (and all that they bring- and draw), good restaurants, a good music
scene, a progressive attitude and tolerance. Hmmm. I'm sure there are many more to ponder. But
that's my start. Oh, lots of bars!
From: http://www.city-data.com/forum/austin/1694181-what-makes-city-like-austin-portland-3.html
City-data.com incorrectly marks “West” and “Portland”
as the cities in Texas -- presumably because of their
textual and spatial proximity to “Austin”.

Spatial minimality often fails
28
From: http://www.city-data.com/forum/austin/1694181-what-makes-city-like-austin-portland-3.html
City-data.com incorrectly marks “West” and “Portland”
as the cities in Texas -- presumably because of their
textual and spatial proximity to “Austin”.
But: it is clear from the text that Portland, Oregon and
Austin,Texas are the referents, though their states are
never mentioned and are far from the other locations!

Toponym classiﬁers
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Strategy: build a textual classiﬁer per toponym by
obtaining indirectly labeled examples from Wikipedia.

Toponym classiﬁers
29
Strategy: build a textual classiﬁer per toponym by
obtaining indirectly labeled examples from Wikipedia.
P(Portland-OR|music) > P(Portland-ME|music)
P(Portland-OR|wharf ) < P(Portland-ME|wharf )

Geographic word proﬁles learned from Wikipedia grid LMs
30

TopoCluster: gazetteer-free toponym resolution
31

Results: disambiguating toponyms
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TR-CoNLL LGL CWar WoTR
Population 91 63 62 64
SPIDER
(spatial minimality)
65 68 67 69
WISTR
(Wiki supervised)
89 64 73 63
SPIDER
+WISTR
87 78 87 69
TopoCluster 92 75 93 71

New corpus: War of the Rebellion
33
Historical document collection.
Both toponym and document lat/lon.
10,380 annotated toponyms, including
lat/lon and regions.
Will be freely available.
Coming soon!
Contact me for details.

Grounding, more generally
34
Grounding often involves connecting text to
knowledge sources and other modalities such as
demographics, time, image, and video.

Grounding, more generally
34
Grounding often involves connecting text to
knowledge sources and other modalities such as
demographics, time, image, and video.
This can help us create models for deeper aspects of
language, such as syntactic structure and logical form.

He says, she says http://www.tweetolife.com/gender/

Temporality of words, by hour http://www.tweetolife.com/hour/
36

Temporality of expressions, by day: http://www.google.com/trends
37

Temporality of expressions, by year: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/
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slave
trenches aircraft
war

Temporal resolution [Kumar, Lease, and Baldridge 2011]
39
2000BC
0AD
2000AD
4000BC

More modalities: videos [Motwani & Mooney, 2012]
40

Beyond word co-occurences for vector-space models
41
bear boat car cow hadoop snow water wrench
3 234 42 4 1 2 325 0
beach

Combining distributional models with logics
42
Erk (2013):“Towards a semantics for distributional representations.”
Garrette et al (2012):“A formal approach to linking logical form and vector-space lexical semantics”
Beltagy et al (2013):“Montague Meets Markov: Deep Semantics with Probabilistic Logical Form”

Multi-component structured vector-space models
43
beachchildren
visit
the children visit the beach
Agent Patient

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!

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

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

Jason Baldridge, Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin at MLconf SEA - 5/20/16

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Jason Baldridge, Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin at MLconf SEA - 5/20/16