Semantic News Mapper

A light-weight demo app and processing scripts for geospatial semantic search. Designed for any kind of textual data with geospatial references. Repository for the Springer paper: Embedding-Based Multilingual Semantic Search for Geo-Textual Data in Urban Studies

Idea

The paper describes an approach to use semantic similarity for geospatial purposes, like georeferenced social media data.

Data samples

BAAI Industry Corpus 2

Script for Data Processing & Reproduction

Scripts for data processing can be found here:

• Data Mining: https://github.com/do-me/fast-instagram-scraper
• Data Processing & Text Inferencing: https://gist.github.com/do-me/d60ea47d0dc97ba40c9d727bf26f7a77
• Index creating for loading in JavaScript Frontend: https://gist.github.com/do-me/dc8877049c2c074df3c7d8e707adf138

Example Queries

See the screenshots folder for query comparisons between the location-averaged and individual embedding indice.

Performance

File size

See the data directory for comparison: https://github.com/do-me/semantic-hexbins/tree/main/data

Speed

Tested devices:

• Windows laptop with Intel i7-8550 CPU
• Ubuntu laptop with AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U
• Android phone Samsung S9 with Exynos 9810
• Apple iPhone 15 Pro with A17 Pro

Run times for a full layer update are significantly below 200ms with ~60ms inferencing time. Iphone 15 Pro averages around 54ms (33ms for inferencing) for 100 runs.

For comparison to a simple full-text search (GFTS) in JS see this app: https://do-me.github.io/semantic-hexbins/full_text_search_benchmark/. It benchmarks dummy data in social media style with 4 columns: lat, lon, location ID and text.

Screenshot results run on an M3 Max.

Previous research

• An Application-Oriented Implementation of Hexagonal On-the-fly Binning Metrics for City-Scale Georeferenced Social Media Data
• Developing a Privacy-Aware Map-Based Cross-Platform Social Media Dashboard for Municipal Decision-Making