Text-based document geolocation and its application to the digital humanities

This dissertation investigates automatic geolocation of documents (i.e. identification of their location, expressed as latitude/longitude coordinates), based on the text of those documents rather than metadata. I assert that such geolocation can be performed using text alone, at a sufficient accuracy for use in real-world applications. Although in some corpora metadata is found in abundance (e.g. home location, time zone, friends, followers, etc. in Twitter), it is lacking in others, such as many corpora of primary-source documents in the digital humanities, an area to which document geolocation has hardly been applied. To this end, I first develop methods for accurate text-based geolocation and then apply them to newly-annotated corpora in the digital humanities. The geolocation methods I develop use both uniform and adaptive (k-d tree) grids over the Earth’s surface, culminating in a hierarchical logistic-regression-based technique that achieves state of the art results on well-known corpora (Twitter user feeds, Wikipedia articles and Flickr image tags). In the second part of the dissertation I develop a new NLP task, text-based geolocation of historical corpora. Because there are no existing corpora to test on, I create and annotate two new corpora of significantly different natures (a 19th-century travel log and a large set of Civil War archives). I show how my methods produce good geolocation accuracy even given the relatively small amount of annotated data available, which can be further improved using domain adaptation. I then use the predictions on the much larger unannotated portion of the Civil War archives to generate and analyze geographic topic models, showing how they can be mined to produce interesting revelations concerning various Civil War-related subjects. Finally, I develop a new geolocation technique for text-only corpora involving co-training between document-geolocation and toponym- resolution models, using a gazetteer to inject additional information into the training process. To evaluate this technique I develop a new metric, the closest toponym error distance, on which I show improvements compared with a baseline geolocator.Linguistic

REDISCOVERY OF A NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURAL LANDSCAPE: THE CHICKASAW HOMELAND AT REMOVAL

Little information beyond generalities exists regarding the cultural landscape of the Chickasaw Indians in their ancestral homelands prior to Removal in the late 1830s. This dissertation evaluates one possible archival source for specifics of Chickasaw land use, the field notes and survey plats compiled as part of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS). The process of original survey following land cession treaty divided the ceded area up into the familiar square-mile rectangular system of townships and ranges that extends from the Mississippi Territory westwards, in the so-called public land states. The research compiles all cultural observations made by the surveyors within a fourteen township area (totaling 504 square miles). This study area, generally located on the west bank of Town Creek between present-day Tupelo and Pontotoc MS, was chosen to cover the traditional center of Chickasaw settlement and elements of important roads such as the Natchez Trace. The resulting catalog of observations was compared to similar features on the township plats and to other cultural resource inventories to identify patterns of inscription and possible erasure of Native American cultural activities. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology was used to consolidate and compare these data resources. The PLSS survey documents provide a useful but not complete resource for identifying Chickasaw cultural presence within the study area. No consistent pattern of omission or erasure of Chickasaw activities was identified. The analysis identifies several opportunities and caveats for future researchers who might extend this analysis, including technical challenges in applying GIS technology to this data

2013 Oklahoma Research Day Full Program

This document contains all abstracts from the 2013 Oklahoma Research Day held at the University of Central Oklahoma

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)

Cherokee Households and Communities in the English Contact Period, A.D. 1670-1740

This study focuses on issues of culture contact and the materialization of identity through an archaeological case study of a late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Cherokee community located in eastern Tennessee. The English Contact period (ca. A.D. 1670-1740) was an extremely turbulent time for southeastern Indian groups marked by disease, warfare, and population movements. I examine how this chaotic period played out in the daily lives of Cherokee households. I use primary and secondary sources to develop an historical context for the English Contact period in the southeastern United States. I introduce a reliable way to identify English Contact period Cherokee occupations using pottery and glass trade bead data. I also consult artifact data in order to identify patterns associated with change and stability in the activities of daily life within Cherokee households. I find that daily life in Cherokee households changed dramatically as they coped with the shifting social, political, and economic currents of the English Contact period. Based on variability in household pottery assemblages, I argue that this particular Cherokee community included households that migrated from geographically disparate Cherokee settlements. This type of social coalescence is documented among other Indian groups as a strategy employed to ameliorate population loss resulting from European contact. I also find that the architecture and spatial organization of Cherokee communities changed dramatically during the English Contact period. Specifically, the later communities lacked the highly structured spatial organization and long-lived residential areas that typified earlier Mississippian period communities. Ultimately, I argue that these changes too were strategic adaptations to the flexible and transient lifestyle required during the period

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)

Federal Register

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii