Abstract
Place descriptions record qualitative information related to places and their spatial relationships; thus, the geospatial semantics of a place can be extracted from place descriptions. In this study, geotagged microblog short texts recorded in 2017 from the Tibetan Autonomous Region and Qinghai Province were used to extract the place semantics of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau (QTP). ERNIE, a language representation model enhanced by knowledge, was employed to extract thematic topics from the microblog short texts, which were then geolocated and used to analyze the place semantics of the QTP. Considering the large number of microblogs published by tourists in both Qinghai and Tibet, we separated the texts into four datasets according to the user, i.e., local users in Tibet, tourists in Tibet, local users in Qinghai, and tourists in Qinghai, to explore the place semantics of the QTP from different perspectives. The results revealed clear spatial variability in the thematic topics. Tibet is characterized by travel- and scenery-related language, whereas Qinghai is characterized by emotion, work, and beauty salon-related language. The human cognition of place semantics differs between local residents and tourists, and with a greater difference between the two in Tibet than in Qinghai. Weibo texts also indicate that local residents and tourists are concerned with different aspects of the same thematic topics. The cities on the QTP can be classified into three groups according to their geospatial semantic components, i.e., tourism-focused, life-focused, and religion-focused cities.
Highlights
IntroductionPublisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
Spatial semantics in the linguistics domain typically involves how languages structure space and schematize spatial relations from perceptual representations and world knowledge, which is the result of spatial cognition [5,6]
There are two main research questions: (1) Do locals and tourists in the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau (QTP) exhibit different cognition in relation to place semantics? (2) Is there spatial variability in the place semantics related to the QTP? the objective of this study is to investigate place semantics related to the QTP according to different groups of people and spatial locations, and classify cities in the QTP according to their place semantics
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Semantics refers to the meaning of expressions in a language, and includes realistic semantics and cognitive semantics. The meanings of language expressions are related to human cognitive ability [1]. Semantics deals with the meaning of spatial language [2], which is an interdisciplinary research area combining Geographic Information Science (GIScience), cognitive science, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Semantic Web [3,4]. Spatial semantics in the linguistics domain typically involves how languages structure space and schematize spatial relations from perceptual representations and world knowledge, which is the result of spatial cognition [5,6]
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