Recognition of Implicit Geographic Movement in Text

Analyzing the geographic movement of humans, animals, and other phenomena is a growing field of research. This research has benefited urban planning, logistics, animal migration understanding, and much more. Typically, the movement is captured as precise geographic coordinates and time stamps with Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Although some research uses computational techniques to take advantage of implicit movement in descriptions of route directions, hiking paths, and historical exploration routes, innovation would accelerate with a large and diverse corpus. We created a corpus of sentences labeled as describing geographic movement or not and including the type of entity moving. Creating this corpus proved difficult without any comparable corpora to start with, high human labeling costs, and since movement can at times be interpreted differently. To overcome these challenges, we developed an iterative process employing hand labeling, crowd voting for confirmation, and machine learning to predict more labels. By merging advances in word embeddings with traditional machine learning models and model ensembling, prediction accuracy is at an acceptable level to produce a large silver-standard corpus despite the small gold-standard corpus training set. Our corpus will likely benefit computational processing of geography in text and spatial cognition, in addition to detection of movement.

Differentiating Geographic Movement Described in Text Documents

Understanding movement described in text documents is important since text descriptions of movement contain a wealth of geographic and contextual information about the movement of people, wildlife, goods, and much more. Our research makes several contributions to improve our understanding of movement descriptions in text. First, we show how interpreting geographic movement described in text is challenging because of general spatial terms, linguistic constructions that make the thing(s) moving unclear, and many types of temporal references and groupings, among others. Next, as a step to overcome these challenges, we report on an experiment with human subjects through which we identify multiple important characteristics of movement descriptions (found in text) that humans use to differentiate one movement description from another. Based on our empirical results, we provide recommendations for computational analysis using movement described in text documents. Our findings contribute towards an improved understanding of the important characteristics of the underused information about geographic movement that is in the form of text descriptions.