Spot: A Natural Language Interface for Geospatial Searches in OSM

Investigative journalists and fact-checkers have found OpenStreetMap (OSM) to be an invaluable resource for their work due to its extensive coverage and intricate details of various locations, which play a crucial role in investigating news scenes. Despite its value, OSM's complexity presents considerable accessibility and usability challenges, especially for those without a technical background. To address this, we introduce 'Spot', a user-friendly natural language interface for querying OSM data. Spot utilizes a semantic mapping from natural language to OSM tags, leveraging artificially generated sentence queries and a T5 transformer. This approach enables Spot to extract relevant information from user-input sentences and display candidate locations matching the descriptions on a map. To foster collaboration and future advancement, all code and generated data is available as an open-source repository.

DWReCO at CheckThat! 2023: Enhancing Subjectivity Detection through Style-based Data Sampling

This paper describes our submission for the subjectivity detection task at the CheckThat! Lab. To tackle class imbalances in the task, we have generated additional training materials with GPT-3 models using prompts of different styles from a subjectivity checklist based on journalistic perspective. We used the extended training set to fine-tune language-specific transformer models. Our experiments in English, German and Turkish demonstrate that different subjective styles are effective across all languages. In addition, we observe that the style-based oversampling is better than paraphrasing in Turkish and English. Lastly, the GPT-3 models sometimes produce lacklustre results when generating style-based texts in non-English languages.