A deep neural network model for Chinese toponym matching with geographic pre-training model

ABSTRACTMultiple tasks within the field of geographical information retrieval and geographical information sciences necessitate toponym matching, which involves the challenge of aligning toponyms that share a common referent. The multiple string similarity approaches struggle when confronted with the complexities associated with unofficial and/or historical variants of identical toponyms. Also, current state-of-the-art approaches/tools to supervised machine learning rely on labeled samples, and they do not adequately address the intricacies of character replacements either from transliterations or historical shifts in linguistic and cultural norms. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel matching approach that leverages a deep neural network model empowered by geographic language representation model, known as GeoBERT, which stands for geographic Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). This model harnesses the groundbreaking capabilities of the GeoBERT framework by extending a generalized Enhanced Sequential Inference Model architecture and integrating multiple features to enhance the accuracy and robustness of the toponym matching. We present a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed method’s performance using three extensive datasets. The findings clearly illustrate that our approach outperforms the individual similarity metrics used in previous studies.