Points-of-interest (POIs) are an important carriers of location text information in smart cities and have been widely used to extract and identify urban functional regions. However, it is difficult to model the relationship between POIs and urban functional types using existing methods due to insufficient POIs information mining. In this study, we propose a Global Vectors (GloVe)-based, POI type embedding model (GPTEM) to extract and identify urban functional regions at the scale of traffic analysis zones (TAZs) by integrating the co-occurrence information and spatial context of POIs. This method has three main steps. First, we utilize buffer zones centered on each POI to construct the urban functional corpus. Second, we use the constructed corpus and GPTEM to train POI type vectors. Third, we cluster the TAZs and annotate the urban functional types in clustered regions by calculating enrichment factors. The results are evaluated by comparing them against manual annotations and food takeout delivery data, showing that the overall identification accuracy of the proposed method (78.44%) is significantly higher than that of a baseline method based on word2vec. Our work can assist urban planners to efficiently evaluate the development of and changes in the functions of various urban regions.

Geographical named entity matching, a crucial step in address encoding, aims to enhance address resolution accuracy through the precise identification and linkage of geographical named entity data. However, existing approaches tend to ignore the spatial information of entities, leading to misclassification. Drawing on the human process of searching for addresses, this study proposes a multi-objective learning model named GNEMM that integrates the semantic and spatial information of geographical named entities. To further mimic the human cognitive process during address search, it incorporates the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique. By integrating newly added external address data with an advanced large language model (LLM) like GPT-4, it achieves precise address evaluation and recommendation. The model was tested using a standard geographical named entity dataset from Shandong Province, focusing on three sub-tasks: element segmentation, matching, and spatial similarity score prediction. The experimental results indicate that the method achieves a geographical named entity matching accuracy of up to 99%, with improvements of 10% and 5% in the segmentation and prediction sub-tasks. GNEMM performs best in address-matching tasks of various scales, and the vectors extracted by GNEMM perform best in the downstream retrieval and matching of various address types, which verifies its applicability in geographical named entity recommendation applications.

In recent years, the Chinese tourism industry has developed rapidly, leading to significant changes in the relationship between people and space patterns in scenic regions. To attract more tourists, the surrounding environment of a scenic region is usually well developed, attracting a large number of human activities, which creates a cognitive range for the scenic region. From the perspective of tourism, tourists’ perceptions of the region in which tourist attractions are located in a city usually differ from the objective region of the scenic spots. Among them, social media serves as an important medium for tourists to share information about scenic spots and for potential tourists to learn scenic spot information, and it interacts to influence people’s perceptions of the destination image. Extracting the names of tourist attractions from social media data and exploring their spatial distribution patterns is the basis for research on the cognitive region of tourist attractions. This study takes Hangzhou, a well-known tourist city in China, as a case study to explore the human cognitive region of its popular scenic spots. First, we propose a Chinese tourist attraction name extraction model based on RoBERTa-BiLSTM-CRF to extract the names of tourist attractions from social media data. Then, we use a multi-distance spatial clustering method called Ripley’s K to filter the extracted tourist attraction names. Finally, we combine road network data and polygons generated using the chi-shape algorithm to construct the vague cognitive regions of each scenic spot. The results show that the classification indicators of our proposed tourist attraction name extraction model are significantly better than those of previous toponym extraction models and algorithms (precision = 0.7371, recall = 0.6926, F1 = 0.7141), and the extracted vague cognitive regions of tourist attractions also generally conform to people’s habitual cognition.

Address matching, which aims to match an input descriptive address with a standard address in an address database, is a key technology for achieving data spatialization. The construction of today’s smart cities depends heavily on the precise matching of Chinese addresses. Existing methods that rely on rules or text similarity struggle when dealing with nonstandard address data. Deep-learning-based methods often require extracting address semantics for embedded representation, which not only complicates the matching process, but also affects the understanding of address semantics. Inspired by deep transfer learning, we introduce an address matching approach based on a pretraining fine-tuning model to identify semantic similarities between various addresses. We first pretrain the address corpus to enable the address semantic model (abbreviated as ASM) to learn address contexts unsupervised. We then build a labelled address matching dataset using an address-specific geographical feature, allowing the matching problem to be converted into a binary classification prediction problem. Finally, we fine-tune the ASM using the address matching dataset and compare the output with several popular address matching methods. The results demonstrate that our model achieves the best performance, with precision, recall, and an F1 score above 0.98.

Social media is widely used to share real-time information and report accidents during natural disasters. Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task of geospatial information applications that aims to extract location names from natural language text. As a result, the identification of location names from social media information has gradually become a demand. Named entity correction (NEC), as a complementary task of NER, plays a crucial role in ensuring the accuracy of location names and further improving the accuracy of NER. Despite numerous methods having been adopted for NER, including text statistics-based and deep learning-based methods, there has been limited research on NEC. To address this gap, we propose the CTRE model, which is a geospatial named entity recognition and correction model based on the BERT model framework. Our approach enhances the BERT model by introducing incremental pre-training in the pre-training phase, significantly improving the model’s recognition accuracy. Subsequently, we adopt the pre-training fine-tuning mode of the BERT base model and extend the fine-tuning process, incorporating a neural network framework to construct the geospatial named entity recognition model and geospatial named entity correction model, respectively. The BERT model utilizes data augmentation of VGI (volunteered geographic information) data and social media data for incremental pre-training, leading to an enhancement in the model accuracy from 85% to 87%. The F1 score of the geospatial named entity recognition model reaches an impressive 0.9045, while the precision of the geospatial named entity correction model achieves 0.9765. The experimental results robustly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CTRE model, providing a reference for subsequent research on location names.