Kalana Wijegunarathna

Kalana Wijegunarathna and Kristin Stock of Massey University, with Christopher B. Jones of Cardiff University, examined whether large multimodal models could combine a written locality description with a map. Natural-history collections contain huge numbers of specimens whose recorded locations are written as ordinary descriptions rather than coordinates. A collector might have written that a specimen came from a certain distance along a road, near a river, south of a settlement or beside a reserve. Converting such descriptions into coordinates has long required both language interpretation and geographic reasoning.