Pretraining and Finetuning Language Models on Geospatial Networks for Accurate Address Matching

AbstractWe propose a novel framework for pretraining and fine-tuning language models with the goal of determining whether two addresses represent the same physical building. Address matching and building authoritative address catalogues are important to many applications and businesses, such as delivery services, online retail, emergency services, logistics, etc. We propose to view a collection of addresses as an address graph and curate inputs for language models by placing geospatially linked addresses in the same context. Our approach jointly integrates concepts from graph theory and weak supervision with address text and geospatial semantics. This integration enables us to generate informative and diverse address pairs, facilitating pretraining and fine-tuning in a self-supervised manner. Experiments and ablation studies on manually curated datasets and comparisons with state-of-the-art techniques demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. We achieve a 24.49% improvement in recall while maintaining 95% precision on average, in comparison to the current baseline across multiple geographies. Further, we deploy our proposed approach and show the positive impact of improving address matching on geocode learning.