HeGeL: A Novel Dataset for Geo-Location from Hebrew Text
Tzuf Paz-Argaman Tal Bauman Itai Mondshine Itzhak Omer Sagi Dalyot Reut Tsarfaty
The task of textual geolocation - retrieving the coordinates of a place based
on a free-form language description - calls for not only grounding but also
natural language understanding and geospatial reasoning. Even though there are
quite a few datasets in English used for geolocation, they are currently based
on open-source data (Wikipedia and Twitter), where the location of the
described place is mostly implicit, such that the location retrieval resolution
is limited. Furthermore, there are no datasets available for addressing the
problem of textual geolocation in morphologically rich and resource-poor
languages, such as Hebrew. In this paper, we present the Hebrew Geo-Location
(HeGeL) corpus, designed to collect literal place descriptions and analyze
lingual geospatial reasoning. We crowdsourced 5,649 literal Hebrew place
descriptions of various place types in three cities in Israel. Qualitative and
empirical analysis show that the data exhibits abundant use of geospatial
reasoning and requires a novel environmental representation.