mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

GeoLM: Empowering Language Models for Geospatially Grounded Language Understanding

arXiv 2310.14478 ↗First posted 23 Oct 2023cs.CLcited by 37

On the map: LLM reasoning → Spatial and embodied reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Humans subconsciously engage in geospatial reasoning when reading articles. We recognize place names and their spatial relations in text and mentally associate them with their physical locations on Earth. Although pretrained language models can mimic this cognitive process using linguistic context, they do not utilize valuable geospatial information in large, widely available geographical databases, e.g., OpenStreetMap. This paper introduces GeoLM, a geospatially grounded language model that enhances the understanding of geo-entities in natural language. GeoLM leverages geo-entity mentions as anchors to connect linguistic information in text corpora with geospatial information extracted from geographical databases. GeoLM connects the two types of context through contrastive learning and masked language modeling. It also incorporates a spatial coordinate embedding mechanism to encode distance and direction relations to capture geospatial context. In the experiment, we demonstrate that GeoLM exhibits promising capabilities in supporting toponym recognition, toponym linking, relation extraction, and geo-entity typing, which bridge the gap between natural language processing and geospatial sciences. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/knowledge-computing/geolm.

Key facts. Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Spatial and embodied reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 28 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2023.

Builds on

28 of 53 references.

References · 28

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,456
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
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  7. 2021SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddingscited by 2,168
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  12. 2019KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representationcited by 356
16 more
  1. 2020Autoregressive Entity Retrievalcited by 333
  2. 2020LUKE: Deep Contextualized Entity Representations with Entity-aware Self-attentioncited by 326
  3. 2020Self-Alignment Pretraining for Biomedical Entity Representationscited by 233
  4. 2020Learning the Best Pooling Strategy for Visual Semantic Embeddingcited by 136
  5. 2021Temporal Adaptation of BERT and Performance on Downstream Document Classification: Insights from Social Mediacited by 51
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  8. 2017NeuroNER: an easy-to-use program for named-entity recognition based on neural networkscited by 25
  9. 2022SpaBERT: A Pretrained Language Model from Geographic Data for Geo-Entity Representationcited by 23
  10. 2018A Pragmatic Guide to Geoparsing Evaluationcited by 17
  11. 2022Location reference recognition from texts: A survey and comparisoncited by 17
  12. 2021JuriBERT: A Masked-Language Model Adaptation for French Legal Textcited by 14
  13. 2020Enhancing spatial and textual analysis with EUPEG: an extensible and unified platform for evaluating geoparserscited by 9
  14. 2021BERTweetFR : Domain Adaptation of Pre-Trained Language Models for French Tweetscited by 9
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 12; 2025: 17; 2026: 6.

37 papers.

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  1. 2024A Comprehensive Survey of Scientific Large Language Models and Their Applications in Scientific Discoverycited by 96
  2. 2023Urban Generative Intelligence (UGI): A Foundational Platform for Agents in Embodied City Environmentcited by 37
  3. 2024CityGPT: Empowering Urban Spatial Cognition of Large Language Modelscited by 29
  4. 2024Towards Urban General Intelligence: A Review and Outlook of Urban Foundation Modelscited by 23
  5. 2025Foundation Models for Spatio-Temporal Data Science: A Tutorial and Surveycited by 23
  6. 2024UrbanKGent: A Unified Large Language Model Agent Framework for Urban Knowledge Graph Constructioncited by 15
  7. 2025MapQA: Open-domain Geospatial Question Answering on Map Datacited by 15
  8. 2025AI Sees Your Location, But With A Bias Toward The Wealthy Worldcited by 14
  9. 2023GeoLocator: a location-integrated large multimodal model for inferring geo-privacycited by 13
  10. 2025Spatial-RAG: Spatial Retrieval Augmented Generation for Real-World Geospatial Reasoning Questionscited by 13
  11. 2024Evaluating the Ability of Large Language Models to Reason about Cardinal Directionscited by 10
  12. 2024GeoReasoner: Reasoning On Geospatially Grounded Context For Natural Language Understandingcited by 10
25 more
  1. 2025Unraveling Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models via the Pipeline Lens: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 10
  2. 2024Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Geospatial Objects: A Surveycited by 8
  3. 2024Evaluation of Geographical Distortions in Language Modelscited by 6
  4. 2024Where on Earth Do Users Say They Are?: Geo-Entity Linking for Noisy Multilingual User Inputcited by 4
  5. 2025MoRA: Mobility as the Backbone for Geospatial Representation Learning at Scalecited by 4
  6. 2025Mitigating Geospatial Knowledge Hallucination in Large Language Models: Benchmarking and Dynamic Factuality Aligningcited by 3
  7. 2026Mobility-Embedded POIs: Learning What A Place Is and How It Is Used from Human Movementcited by 3
  8. 2024Exploring Language Model Generalization in Low-Resource Extractive QAcited by 2
  9. 2024Comparative Performance of Advanced NLP Models and LLMs in Multilingual Geo-Entity Detectioncited by 2
  10. 2025Urban Computing in the Era of Large Language Modelscited by 2
  11. 2025A Vision for Geo-Temporal Deep Research Systems: Towards Comprehensive, Transparent, and Reproducible Geo-Temporal Information Synthesiscited by 2
  12. 2025DIGMAPPER: A Modular System for Automated Geologic Map Digitizationcited by 2
  13. 2024Graph-Structured Trajectory Extraction from Traveloguescited by 1
  14. 2025Evaluating the Ability of Large Language Models to Reason about Cardinal Directions, Revisitedcited by 1
  15. 2025GeoResponder: Towards Building Geospatial LLMs for Time-Critical Disaster Responsecited by 1
  16. 2025Knowledge Graph-Guided Multi-Agent Distillation for Reliable Industrial Question Answering with Datasetscited by 1
  17. 2025Detecting Legend Items on Historical Maps Using GPT-4o with In-Context Learningcited by 1
  18. 2025Georeferencing complex relative locality descriptions with large language modelscited by 1
  19. 2026DisasterBench: Benchmarking LLM Planning under Typed Tool Interface Constraintscited by 1
  20. 2025TraveLLaMA: A Multimodal Travel Assistant with Large-Scale Dataset and Structured Reasoningcited by 0
  21. 2025IMAIA: Interactive Maps AI Assistant for Travel Planning and Geo-Spatial Intelligencecited by 0
  22. 2026NARA: Anchor-Conditioned Representation Learning for Heterogeneous Vector Geoentitiescited by 0
  23. 2026TransitLM: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Map-Free Transit Route Generationcited by 0
  24. 2026Georeferencing Non-Gazetteered Place Names using Biological Specimen Recordscited by 0
  25. 2026Location-Aware Language Models via Secondary Embeddingscited by 0

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2023Are Large Language Models Geospatially Knowledgeable?
  2. 2025Geospatial Mechanistic Interpretability of Large Language Models
  3. 2025OmniGeo: Towards a Multimodal Large Language Models for Geospatial Artificial Intelligence
  4. 2024Quantifying Geospatial in the Common Crawl Corpus
  5. 2025Foundation Models for Geospatial Reasoning: Assessing Capabilities of Large Language Models in Understanding Geometries and Topological Spatial Relations
  6. 2025Coordinates from Context: Using LLMs to Ground Complex Location References
  7. 2025Can Large Language Models Integrate Spatial Data? Empirical Insights into Reasoning Strengths and Computational Weaknesses
  8. 2025Can Multimodal Large Language Models Understand Spatial Relations?