RACCOON: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Approach for Location Coordinate Capture from News Articles

Geocoding involves automatic extraction of location coordinates of incidents reported in news articles, and can be used for epidemic intelligence or disaster management. This paper introduces Retrieval-Augmented Coordinate Capture Of Online News articles (RACCOON), an open-source geocoding approach that extracts geolocations from news articles. RACCOON uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach where candidate locations and associated information are retrieved in the form of context from a location database, and a prompt containing the retrieved context, location mentions and news articles is fed to an LLM to generate the location coordinates. Our evaluation on three datasets, two underlying LLMs, three baselines and several ablation tests based on the components of RACCOON demonstrate the utility of RACCOON. To the best of our knowledge, RACCOON is the first RAG-based approach for geocoding using pre-trained LLMs.

Relation Extraction from News Articles : A Tool for Epidemic Surveillance

Relation Extraction from News Articles (RENA) is a browser-based tool designed to extract key entities and their semantic relationships in English language news articles related to infectious diseases. Constructed using the React framework, this system presents users with an elegant and user-friendly interface. It enables users to input a news article and select from a choice of two models to generate a comprehensive list of relations within the provided text. As a result, RENA allows real-time parsing of news articles to extract key information for epidemic surveillance, contributing to EPIWATCH, an open-source intelligence-based epidemic warning system.