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Predicting Distance and Direction from Text Locality Descriptions for Biological Specimen Collections

Authors Ruoxuan Liao, Pragyan P. Das, Christopher B. Jones , Niloofar Aflaki, Kristin Stock

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Author Details

Ruoxuan Liao
  • Massey Geoinformatics Collaboratory, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
Pragyan P. Das
  • Massey Geoinformatics Collaboratory, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
Christopher B. Jones
  • School of Computer Science and Informatics, Cardiff University, UK
Niloofar Aflaki
  • Massey Geoinformatics Collaboratory, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand
Kristin Stock
  • Massey Geoinformatics Collaboratory, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

Funding

This work was partly funded under the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Enterprise Endeavour Fund BioWhere project, and used data collections owned by Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research New Zealand.

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Ruoxuan Liao, Pragyan P. Das, Christopher B. Jones, Niloofar Aflaki, and Kristin Stock. Predicting Distance and Direction from Text Locality Descriptions for Biological Specimen Collections. In 15th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2022). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 240, pp. 4:1-4:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2022) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2022.4

Abstract

A considerable proportion of records that describe biological specimens (flora, soil, invertebrates), and especially those that were collected decades ago, are not attached to corresponding geographical coordinates, but rather have their location described only through textual descriptions (e.g. North Canterbury, Selwyn River near bridge on Springston-Leeston Rd). Without geographical coordinates, millions of records stored in museum collections around the world cannot be mapped. We present a method for predicting the distance and direction associated with human language location descriptions which focuses on the interpretation of geospatial prepositions and the way in which they modify the location represented by an associated reference place name (e.g. near the Manawatu River). We study eight distance-oriented prepositions and eight direction-oriented prepositions and use machine learning regression to predict distance or direction, relative to the reference place name, from a collection of training data. The results show that, compared with a simple baseline, our model improved distance predictions by up to 60% and direction predictions by up to 31%.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computing methodologies → Machine learning
Keywords
  • geospatial prepositions
  • biological specimen collections
  • georeferencing
  • natural language processing
  • locative expressions
  • locality descriptions
  • geoparsing
  • geocoding
  • geographic information retrieval
  • regression
  • machine learning

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