Resource – Paper 371

Neural Embeddings for Populated Geonames Locations Mayank Kejriwal and Pedro Szekely Resource October 25, 2017, 10:30. Stolz 2 Download paper (preprint)

Abstract

The application of neural embedding algorithms (based on architectures like skip-grams) to large knowledge bases like Wikipedia and the Google News Corpus has tremendously benefited multiple com- munities in applications as diverse as sentiment analysis, named entity recognition and text classification. In this paper, we present a similar resource for geospatial applications. We systematically construct a weighted network that spans all populated places in Geonames. Using a network embedding algorithm that was recently found to achieve excellent results and is based on the skip-gram model, we embed each populated place into a 100-dimensional vector space, in a similar vein as the GloVe embeddings released for Wikipedia. We demonstrate potential applications of this dataset resource, which we release under a public license.