In recent years, with increasing international communication and cooperation, the consensus of toponymic information among different countries has become increasingly important. A large number of English geographical names are in urgent need of translation into Chinese, but there are few studies on machine translation of geographical names at present. Therefore, this paper proposes a method of automatically translating English geographical names into Chinese. First, the lexical structure of the geographic names is analyzed to divide the whole name into two parts, the special name and the general name, in an approach based on the statistical template model that implements pointwise mutual information and a directed acyclic graph data structure on the extracted names from different categories of a geographical name corpus. Second, the two parts of the geographic names are translated. The general name can be directly translated via methods of free translation. For the transliteration of the special name, the phonetic symbols are generated based on the cyclic neural network, and then, the syllables are divided based on the minimum entropy and converted into Chinese characters. Finally, the two parts of Chinese characters are combined, and criteria are prepared to evaluate the translation reliability according to the translation process to realize automatic quality inspection and screening of geographical names. As the experimental results show, the method is effective in the translation process of English geographic names into Chinese. This method can be easily extended to other languages such as Arabic.

Climate change is causing permafrost in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau to degrade, triggering thermokarst hazards and impacting the environment. Despite their ecological importance, the distribution and risks of thermokarst lakes are not well understood due to complex influencing factors. In this study, we introduced a new interpretable ensemble learning method designed to improve the global and local interpretation of susceptibility assessments for thermokarst lakes. Our primary aim was to offer scientific support for precisely evaluating areas prone to thermokarst lake formation. In the thermokarst lake susceptibility assessment, we identified ten conditioning factors related to the formation and distribution of thermokarst lakes. In this highly accurate stacking model, the primary learning units were the random forest (RF), extremely randomized trees (EXTs), extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost), and categorical boosting (CatBoost) algorithms. Meanwhile, gradient boosted decision trees (GBDTs) were employed as the secondary learning unit. Based on the stacking model, we assessed thermokarst lake susceptibility and validated accuracy through six evaluation indices. We examined the interpretability of the stacking model using three interpretation methods: accumulated local effects (ALE), local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME), and Shapley additive explanations (SHAP). The results showed that the ensemble learning stacking model demonstrated superior performance and the highest prediction accuracy. Approximately 91.20% of the total thermokarst hazard points fell within the high and very high susceptible areas, encompassing 20.08% of the permafrost expanse in the QTP. The conclusive findings revealed that slope, elevation, the topographic wetness index (TWI), and precipitation were the primary factors influencing the assessment of thermokarst lake susceptibility. This comprehensive analysis extends to the broader impacts of thermokarst hazards, with the identified high and very high susceptibility zones affecting significant stretches of railway and highway infrastructure, substantial soil organic carbon reserves, and vast alpine grasslands. This interpretable ensemble learning model, which exhibits high accuracy, offers substantial practical significance for project route selection, construction, and operation in the QTP.

To address current issues in natural language spatiotemporal queries, including insufficient question semantic understanding, incomplete semantic information extraction, and inaccurate intent recognition, this paper proposes NL2Cypher, a DeBERTa (Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention)-based natural language spatiotemporal question semantic conversion model. The model first performs semantic encoding on natural language spatiotemporal questions, extracts pre-trained features based on the DeBERTa model, inputs feature vector sequences into BiGRU (Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit) to learn text features, and finally obtains globally optimal label sequences through a CRF (Conditional Random Field) layer. Then, based on the encoding results, it performs classification and semantic parsing of spatiotemporal questions to achieve question intent recognition and conversion to Cypher query language. The experimental results show that the proposed DeBERTa-based conversion model NL2Cypher can accurately achieve semantic information extraction and intent understanding in both simple and compound queries when using Chinese corpus, reaching an F1 score of 92.69%, with significant accuracy improvement compared to other models. The conversion accuracy from spatiotemporal questions to query language reaches 88% on the training set and 92% on the test set. The proposed model can quickly and accurately query spatiotemporal data using natural language questions. The research results provide new tools and perspectives for subsequent knowledge graph construction and intelligent question answering, effectively promoting the development of geographic information towards intelligent services.

There are rich proper noun derivative semantic relationships in geographic entity vector data. The identification of traditional proper noun derivative semantic relationships usually requires toponym researchers to examine the source of derived toponyms by consulting a large number of toponym documents. This method cannot adapt to the mining of proper noun derivative semantic relationships for large-scale geographical entity. In this regard, this paper proposes a method of identifying the proper noun derivative semantic relationships for geographical entity by combining prompt learning and XGBoost model. This method transforms the extraction problem of proper noun derivative semantic relationships into a binary classification problem by analyzing the characteristics of the derivation relationship of toponyms in the form of toponyms and the spatial and temporal distribution of geography. Firstly, prompt learning and gaussian mixture model are used to extract and cluster the derivation words of toponyms, so as to realize the recognition of derived toponyms collections. Then, enumerate the possible proper noun derivations in the toponym set, and then the XGBoost model is used to identify the semantic relations derived from the proper noun of geographical entities. In the experiment, the recognition method of proper noun derivative semantic relationships based on prompt learning and XGBoost proposed in this paper has achieved good relationship recognition effect in the experiment. This method has certain practical value in the fields of toponym management and toponym translation.

As the proper noun for geographical entities, place names provide an intuitive way to identify and access specific geographic locations, playing a key role in semantic expression and spatial retrieval. However, existing research has insufficiently explored the spatio-temporal derivation relationships of place names, failing to fully utilize these relationships to enhance the connectivity between place names and improve spatial retrieval capabilities. Therefore, this paper conducts research on the spatio-temporal derivation relationships of place names, defines them in a standardized manner, clarifies the boundary conditions and identification methods, and then constructs a spatio-temporal derivation network of place names for expression and uses this network to carry out reasoning research on spatial adjacency relationships. Experiments and results showed that using the theory and methods of this paper to identify the spatio-temporal derivation relationships of Canadian place names achieves an accuracy rate of 98.5% and a recall rate of 93.4%, and the reasoning results can effectively improve the accuracy of query results. The research enriches the theoretical framework of spatio-temporal derivation relationships of place names, solves the current problems of unclear definition and inability to automatically identify spatio-temporal derivation relationships, and provides new perspectives and tools for the application practice in the field of geographical information science.

In producing English-Chinese bilingual maps, it is usually necessary to translate English place names into Chinese. However, pipeline-based methods for translating place names splits the place name translation task into multiple sub-tasks, carries the risk of error propagation, resulting in lower efficiency and poorer accuracy. Meanwhile, there is relatively little research on place name joint translation. In this regard, the study proposes an English-Chinese place name joint translation method based on prompt learning and knowledge graph enhancement. This method aims to improve the accuracy of English-Chinese place name translation. The proposed method is divided into two parts: The first part is the construction of prompt word template for place name translation. For the translation task of place names, the study first analyzes the characteristics of the transliteration of specific names and the semantic translation of generic names, constructing prompt word templates for the joint translation of ordinary place names. Then, based on the prompt words for ordinary place name translation, it takes into account the translation characteristics of the derived parts in derived place names, constructing a prompt word template for the joint translation of derived place names. Ultimately, leveraging the powerful contextual learning ability of LLM (Large Language Models), it achieves the joint translation of English and Chinese place names. The second part is the construction of the ontology of place name translation knowledge graph. To retrieve relevant knowledge about the input place names, the study designs an ontology for a knowledge graph of place names translation aimed at the English-Chinese place name translation task, combining the needs of English-Chinese place name translation and the semantic relationships between place names. This enhances the contextual information of the input place names and improves the performance of large language models in the English-Chinese place name translation task. Experiments have shown that compared to traditional pipeline-based place name translation methods, the place name translation method proposed in the study has improved performance by 21.26% in ordinary place name translation and an average of 27.70% in the field of derived place name translation. In bilingual map production, the method effectively improves the efficiency and accuracy of toponymic translation. Simultaneously providing reference for place name translation tasks in other languages.