NewsRECON: News Article Retrieval for Image Contextualization

Large-scale news corpora support a wide range of research in Computational Social Science and NLP, yet access remains constrained: commercial archives impose prohibitive costs and licensing restrictions, while open alternatives like Common Crawl's CC-News require terabyte-scale storage and computationally intensive processing. We present Infini-News, a retrieval toolkit and index for the entire CC-News archive from August 2016 to the latest available snapshot. Our contributions are threefold. First, we extract, clean the text, and parse the structured metadata of over 1.35B articles. Second, we enrich the corpus with language detection using three frontier language classifiers (GlotLID, lingua, and CommonLingua), and with multi-source geographic attribution that resolves a country of origin for 83.4% of articles across 222 countries. Third, we construct Infini-gram indexes: suffix-array structures that let researchers search the full archive for arbitrary text patterns in sub-second time. Together, these resources lower the barrier to longitudinal, cross-national media research.

Image geolocation aims to estimate where a photograph was taken from its visual content. At worldwide scale, this remains challenging because visual evidence is often ambiguous, diverse, and unevenly distributed. Prior work has typically treated geolocation of ordinary internet photos and street-view imagery as separate tasks, despite their complementary strengths: internet photos better match the appearance distribution of user-captured queries, while street-view imagery provides denser, geographically grounded coverage. We present Pinpoint, a retrieve-and-rerank architecture that combines both sources in a coarse-to-fine pipeline. A contrastive image-GPS embedder is trained on both user-uploaded Flickr photos and street-view imagery, learning a shared image-GPS embedding space that is used to retrieve candidate locations. An attention-based reranker then rescores retrieved candidates by combining candidate-level visual and GPS features with cross-source evidence from nearby locations to ground the prediction. Unlike recent prior work, Pinpoint does not rely on multimodal large-language models, making inference faster and more reproducible. Pinpoint achieves state-of-the-art results across all metrics on standard benchmarks for internet photos (IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k) and street-view imagery (OSV-5M).

Worldwide image geolocalization, which aims to predict the GPS coordinates of any image on Earth, remains challenging due to global visual diversity. Recent generative approaches based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) leverage candidates retrieved from fixed databases for reasoning, but often struggle with scenes that are absent from the reference set. In this work, we propose GeoSearch, an open-world geolocation framework that integrates web-scale reverse image search into the RAG pipeline. GeoSearch augments LMM prompts with database-retrieved coordinates and textual evidence extracted from web pages. To mitigate noise from irrelevant content, we introduce a two-layer filtering mechanism consisting of image matching, followed by confidence-based gating. Experiments on standard benchmarks Im2GPS3k and YFCC4k demonstrate the superiority of GeoSearch under leakage-aware evaluation. Our code and data are publicly available to support reproducibility.