Abstract
Autonomous web-based geographical information systems (AWebGIS) aim to
perform geospatial operations from natural language input, providing intuitive,
intelligent, and hands-free interaction. However, most current solutions rely
on cloud-based large language models (LLMs), which require continuous internet
access and raise users' privacy and scalability issues due to centralized
server processing. This study compares three approaches to enabling AWebGIS:
(1) a fully-automated online method using cloud-based LLMs (e.g., Cohere); (2)
a semi-automated offline method using classical machine learning classifiers
such as support vector machine and random forest; and (3) a fully autonomous
offline (client-side) method based on a fine-tuned small language model (SLM),
specifically T5-small model, executed in the client's web browser. The third
approach, which leverages SLMs, achieved the highest accuracy among all
methods, with an exact matching accuracy of 0.93, Levenshtein similarity of
0.99, and recall-oriented understudy for gisting evaluation ROUGE-1 and ROUGE-L
scores of 0.98. Crucially, this client-side computation strategy reduces the
load on backend servers by offloading processing to the user's device,
eliminating the need for server-based inference. These results highlight the
feasibility of browser-executable models for AWebGIS solutions.