Leveraging Large Language Models for Textual Geotagging: A Novel Approach to Location Inference
Abstract
This study explores the application of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly GPT-4o, to textual geotagging, introducing a novel dataset of tweets with geographical annotations. Using zero-shot and few-shot approaches, we demonstrate GPT-4o's ability to infer location from explicit and implicit textual references in tweets, achieving average errors as low as 43 km for explicit mentions. Our experiments reveal LLMs' robust geographical knowledge and adaptability to geotagging tasks with minimal context. The research also highlights LLMs' potential in advancing geographical inference from text, identifying challenges and effects of data quality, and opportunities for improving model performance on implicit references and noisy data.
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