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Documents authored by Wijegunarathna, Kalana

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DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.12
Large Multi-Modal Model Cartographic Map Comprehension for Textual Locality Georeferencing

Authors: Kalana Wijegunarathna, Kristin Stock, and Christopher B. Jones

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 346, 13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025)

Abstract
Millions of biological sample records collected in the last few centuries archived in natural history collections are un-georeferenced. Georeferencing complex locality descriptions associated with these collection samples is a highly labour-intensive task collection agencies struggle with. None of the existing automated methods exploit maps that are an essential tool for georeferencing complex relations. We present preliminary experiments and results of a novel method that exploits multi-modal capabilities of recent Large Multi-Modal Models (LMM). This method enables the model to visually contextualize spatial relations it reads in the locality description. We use a grid-based approach to adapt these auto-regressive models for this task in a zero-shot setting. Our experiments conducted on a small manually annotated dataset show impressive results for our approach (∼1 km Average distance error) compared to uni-modal georeferencing with Large Language Models and existing georeferencing tools. The paper also discusses the findings of the experiments in light of an LMM’s ability to comprehend fine-grained maps. Motivated by these results, a practical framework is proposed to integrate this method into a georeferencing workflow.
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Kalana Wijegunarathna, Kristin Stock, and Christopher B. Jones. Large Multi-Modal Model Cartographic Map Comprehension for Textual Locality Georeferencing. In 13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 346, pp. 12:1-12:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025)

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@InProceedings{wijegunarathna_et_al:LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.12,
  author =	{Wijegunarathna, Kalana and Stock, Kristin and Jones, Christopher B.},
  title =	{{Large Multi-Modal Model Cartographic Map Comprehension for Textual Locality Georeferencing}},
  booktitle =	{13th International Conference on Geographic Information Science (GIScience 2025)},
  pages =	{12:1--12:19},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-378-2},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2025},
  volume =	{346},
  editor =	{Sila-Nowicka, Katarzyna and Moore, Antoni and O'Sullivan, David and Adams, Benjamin and Gahegan, Mark},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.12},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-238412},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.GIScience.2025.12},
  annote =	{Keywords: Large Multi-Modal Models, Large Language Models, LLM, Georeferencing, Natural History collections}
}
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