Toward a Critical Toponymy Framework for Named Entity Recognition: A Case Study of Airbnb in New York City

Mikael Brunila, Jack LaViolette, Sky CH-Wang, Priyanka Verma, Clara Féré, Grant McKenzie


Abstract
Critical toponymy examines the dynamics of power, capital, and resistance through place names and the sites to which they refer. Studies here have traditionally focused on the semantic content of toponyms and the top-down institutional processes that produce them. However, they have generally ignored the ways in which toponyms are used by ordinary people in everyday discourse, as well as the other strategies of geospatial description that accompany and contextualize toponymic reference. Here, we develop computational methods to measure how cultural and economic capital shape the ways in which people refer to places, through a novel annotated dataset of 47,440 New York City Airbnb listings from the 2010s. Building on this dataset, we introduce a new named entity recognition (NER) model able to identify important discourse categories integral to the characterization of place. Our findings point toward new directions for critical toponymy and to a range of previously understudied linguistic signals relevant to research on neighborhood status, housing and tourism markets, and gentrification.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.284
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4676–4695
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.284
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.284
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mikael Brunila, Jack LaViolette, Sky CH-Wang, Priyanka Verma, Clara Féré, and Grant McKenzie. 2023. Toward a Critical Toponymy Framework for Named Entity Recognition: A Case Study of Airbnb in New York City. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4676–4695, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Toward a Critical Toponymy Framework for Named Entity Recognition: A Case Study of Airbnb in New York City (Brunila et al., EMNLP 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.284.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.284.mp4