Multimodal Geolocation Estimation of News Photos

Abstract

The widespread growth of multimodal news requires sophisticated approaches to interpret content and relations of different modalities. Images are of utmost importance since they represent a visual gist of the whole news article. For example, it is essential to identify the locations of natural disasters for crisis management or to analyze political or social events across the world. In some cases, verifying the location(s) claimed in a news article might help human assessors or fact-checking efforts to detect misinformation, i.e., fake news. Existing methods for geolocation estimation typically consider only a single modality, e.g., images or text. However, news images can lack sufficient geographical cues to estimate their locations, and the text can refer to various possible locations. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal approach to predict the geolocation of news photos. To enable this approach, we introduce a novel dataset called Multimodal Geolocation Estimation of News Photos (MMG-NewsPhoto). MMG-NewsPhoto is, so far, the largest dataset for the given task and contains more than half a million news texts with the corresponding image, out of which 3000 photos were manually labeled for the photo geolocation based on information from the image-text pairs. For a fair comparison, we optimize and assess state-of-the-art methods using the new benchmark dataset. Experimental results show the superiority of the multimodal models compared to the unimodal approaches.