  Understanding movement described in text documents is important since text
descriptions of movement contain a wealth of geographic and contextual
information about the movement of people, wildlife, goods, and much more. Our
research makes several contributions to improve our understanding of movement
descriptions in text. First, we show how interpreting geographic movement
described in text is challenging because of general spatial terms, linguistic
constructions that make the thing(s) moving unclear, and many types of temporal
references and groupings, among others. Next, as a step to overcome these
challenges, we report on an experiment with human subjects through which we
identify multiple important characteristics of movement descriptions (found in
text) that humans use to differentiate one movement description from another.
Based on our empirical results, we provide recommendations for computational
analysis using movement described in text documents. Our findings contribute
towards an improved understanding of the important characteristics of the
underused information about geographic movement that is in the form of text
descriptions.
