Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Reading Geography between the Lines: Extracting Local Place Knowledge from Text

  • Conference paper
Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8116))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

The computational linguistics tool Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) can approximately map out geographic placenames within spatially unreferenced web-based text. This paper discusses LSA’s practical potential to help discover and locate local vernacular (unofficial) geographic names. It may also highlight people’s cognitive distortions and biases, creating hypotheses for human experiments, and hinting at identical mechanisms for semantic and spatial memory at these scales. Some successes, problems and methodological issues are illustrated and discussed, with reference to a sample dataset of one area of England. Previous findings were replicated and surpassed, but the space may show more topological than metric tendencies.

This research was funded by Ordnance Survey of Great Britain.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Davies, C., Holt, I., Green, J., Harding, J., Diamond, L.: User Needs and Implications for Modelling Vague Named Places. Spatial Cognition and Computation 9, 174–194 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Levitz, D.: The Awkward Art of Neighborhood Naming. The Atlantic Cities (January 3, 2012), http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/01/awkward-art-neighborhood-naming/843/

  3. Beaumont, L.: Secret Suburbs. The Age (October 3, 2007), http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/10/03/1191091194789.html

  4. British Broadcasting Corporation: PCSOs ’did not watch boy drown’. BBC News (2007), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7007081.stm

  5. Davies, C.: Are Places Concepts? Familarity and Expertise Effects in Neighborhood Cognition. In: Hornsby, K.S., Claramunt, C., Denis, M., Ligozat, G. (eds.) COSIT 2009. LNCS, vol. 5756, pp. 36–50. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  6. Davies, C., Battye, E., Engelbrecht, P.: Places as Fuzzy, Partly Visuospatial Categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied (under review)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Cresswell, T.: Place: a Short Introduction. Blackwell, Oxford (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Foglia, L., Wilson, R.A.: Embodied Cognition. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science (2013), doi: 10.1002/wcs.1226

    Google Scholar 

  9. Anderson, M.L., Richardson, M.J., Chemero, A.: Eroding the Boundaries of Cognition: Implications of Embodiment (1). Topics in Cognitive Science 4, 717–730 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Anderson, M.: Neural Reuse: a Fundamental Organizational Principle of the Brain. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, 245–266 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Sporns, O., Tononi, G., Kötter, R.: The Human Connectome: A Structural Description of the Human Brain. PLOS Computational Biology 1(4), e42 (2005), doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0010042

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Landauer, T.K., McNamara, D.S., Dennis, S., Kintsch, W.: Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Landauer, T.K.: LSA as a Theory of Meaning. In: Landauer, T.K., McNamara, D.S., Dennis, S., Kintsch, W. (eds.) Handbook of Latent Semantic Analysis, pp. 3–34. Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  14. McNamara, D.S.: Computational Methods to Extract Meaning from Text and Advance Theories of Human Cognition. Topics in Cognitive Science 3, 3–17 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Louwerse, M., Cai, Z., Hu, X., Ventura, M., Jeuniaux, P.: Cognitively Inspired NLP-Based Knowledge Representations: Further Explorations of Latent Semantic Analysis. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools 15, 1021–1039 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Louwerse, M.M., Zwaan, R.A.: Language Encodes Geographic Information. Cognitive Science 33, 51–73 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Louwerse, M.M., Hutchinson, S., Cai, Z.: The Chinese Route Argument: Predicting the Longitude and Latitude of Cities in China and the Middle East Using Statistical Linguistic Frequencies. In: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society

    Google Scholar 

  18. Louwerse, M.M., Benesh, N.: Representing Spatial Structure Through Maps and Language: Lord of the Rings Encodes the Spatial Structure of Middle Earth. Cognitive Science 36, 1556–1569 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Hollenstein, L., Purves, R.: Exploring Place Through User Generated Content: Using Flickr tags to Describe City Cores. Journal of Spatial Information Science 1, 21–48

    Google Scholar 

  20. Leidner, J.L., Sinclair, G., Webber, B.: Grounding Spatial Named Entities for Information Extraction and Question Answering. In: Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 Workshop on Analysis of Geographic References, vol. 1, pp. 31–38. Association for Computational Linguistics (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Pasley, R.C., Clough, P.D., Sanderson, M.: Geo-Tagging for Imprecise Regions of Different Sizes. Proceedings of the 4th ACM Workshop on Geographical Information Retrieval, pp. 77–82 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Twaroch, F.A., Jones, C.B., Abdelmoty, A.I.: Acquisition of a Vernacular Gazetteer from Web Sources. In: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Location and the Web, pp. 61–64. ACM (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Jones, C.B., Purves, R.S., Clough, P.D., Joho, H.: Modelling Vague Places with Knowledge from the Web. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 22, 1045–1065 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Whittaker, S., Terveen, L., Hill, W., Cherny, L.: The dynamics of mass interaction. In: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 257–264. ACM (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Purves, R., Edwardes, A., Wood, J.: Describing Place Through User Generated Content. First Monday 16(9) (September 5, 2011), firstmonday.org

  26. Haklay, M.: Nobody Wants to Do Council Estates: Digital Divide, Spatial Justice and Outliers. In: Presented at the 108th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, New York, USA (February 25 2012), http://povesham.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/

  27. Baroni, M., Bernardini, S.: BootCaT: Bootstrapping Corpora and Terms from the Web. In: Proceedings of LREC, pp. 1313–1316 (2004), bootcat.sslmit.unibo.it

  28. Tobler, W.: Bidimensional Regression. Geographical Analysis 26, 186–212 (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Friedman, A., Kohler, B.: Bidimensional Regression: A Method for Assessing the Configural SImilarity of Cognitive Maps and Other Two-Dimensional Data. Psychological Methods 8, 468–491 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Carbon, C.C.: BiDimRegression: Bidimensional Regression Modeling Using R. Journal of Statistical Software (accepted pending minor revision, 2013)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Borg, I., Groenen, P.J.F.: Modern Multidimensional Scaling: Theory and Applications, 2nd edn. Springer, New York (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Cunningham, H., Maynard, D., Bontcheva, K., Tablan, V.: GATE: A Framework and Graphical Development Environment for Robust NLP Tools and Applications. In: Proceedings of the 40th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2002), Philadelphia (July 2002), gate.ac.uk

  33. Finkel, J.R., Grenager, T., Manning, C.: Incorporating Non-local Information into Information Extraction Systems by Gibbs Sampling. In: Proceedings of the 43nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2005), pp. 363–370 (2005), nlp.stanford.edu

  34. Rogers, T.T., McClelland, J.L.: Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach. MIT Press, Cambridge (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  35. Burgess, N., Maguire, E.A., O’Keefe, J.: The Human Hippocampus and Spatial and Episodic Memory. Neuron 35, 625–641 (2002)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Lynch, K.: The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge (1960)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Stankiewicz, B.J., Kalia, A.A.: Acquisition of Structural Versus Object Landmark Knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 33, 378–390 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Murphy, G.L., Hampton, J.A., Milovanovic, G.S.: Semantic memory redux: an experimental test of hierarchical category representation. Journal of Memory and Language 67, 521–539 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. McNamara, T.P., Hardy, J.K., Hirtle, S.C.: Subjective Hierarchies in Spatial Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 15, 211–227 (1989)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Quesada, J.: Creating Your Own LSA Spaces. In: Landauer, et al., op. cit

    Google Scholar 

  41. Bartell, B.T., Cottrell, G.W., Belew, R.K.: Latent Semantic Indexing is an Optimal Special Case of Multidimensional Scaling. In: Proceedings of the 15th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (ACM ), pp. 161–167. ACM (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  42. Platt, J.: On Statistical Approximations of Geographical Maps. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on GeoComputation (2005), http://www.geocomputation.org/2005/Platt.pdf

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Psychology (HJB), University of Winchester, King Alfred Campus, Sparkford Road, Winchester, SO22 4NR, United Kingdom

    Clare Davies

Authors
  1. Clare Davies
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Linguistics & English Language, Bangor University, College Road, LL57 2DG, Bangor, UK

    Thora Tenbrink

  2. School of Computing, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, LS2 9JT, Leeds, UK

    John Stell

  3. College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Harrison Building, North Park Road, EX4 4QF, Exeter, UK

    Antony Galton  & Zena Wood  & 

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Davies, C. (2013). Reading Geography between the Lines: Extracting Local Place Knowledge from Text. In: Tenbrink, T., Stell, J., Galton, A., Wood, Z. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_18

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01790-7_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01789-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01790-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation