Geographic Query Parsing Data Set

Geographic Query Parsing

A geographic query is usually composed of three components, “what”, “geo-relation” and “where”. How to parse queries and extract these components from them is a key problem for geographic information retrieval (GIR).

The keywords in the “what” component indicate what users want to search; “where” indicates the geographic area users are interested in; “geo-relation” stands for the relationship between “what” and “where”. For example, for a query “Restaurant in Beijing, China”, “what” = “Restaurant”, “where” = “Beijing, China”, and “geo-relation” = “IN”. For another query “Mountains in the south of United States”, “what” = “Mountains”, “where” = “United States”, and “geo-relation” = “SOUTH-OF”.

For the “what” component, we categorize it into three types, as listed below:

Map type, users are looking for natural points of interests, like river, beach, mountain, monuments, etc.
Yellow page type, users are looking for businesses or organizations, like hotels, restaurants, hospitals, etc.
Information type, users are looking for text information, like news, articles, blogs, etc.

For the "geo-relation" component, a list of relation types is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Geo-relation Types

Example query

Geo-relation

Beijing

NONE

in Beijing

IN

on the Long Island

ON

of Beijing

OF

near Beijing

next to Beijing

NEAR

in or around Beijing

in and around Beijing

IN_NEAR

along the Rhine

ALONG

at Beijing University

AT

from Beijing

FROM

to Beijing

TO

within d miles of Beijing

DISTANCE

north of Beijing

in the north of Beijing

NORTH_OF

south of Beijing

in the south of Beijing

SOUTH_OF

east of Beijing

in the east of Beijing

EAST_OF

west of Beijing

in the west of Beijing

WEST_OF

northeast of Beijing
in the northeast of Beijing

NORTH_EAST_OF

northwest of Beijing
in the northwest of Beijing

NORTH_WEST_OF

southeast of Beijing
in the southeast of Beijing

SOUTH_EAST_OF

southwest of Beijing
in the southwest of Beijing

SOUTH_WEST_OF

north to Beijing

NORTH_TO

south to Beijing

SOUTH_TO

east to Beijing

EAST_TO

west to Beijing

WEST_TO

northeast to Beijing

NORTH_EAST_TO

northwest to Beijing

NORTH_WEST_TO

southeast to Beijing

SOUTH_EAST_TO

southwest to Beijing

SOUTH_WEST_TO

Data Set

800,000 queries were collected from Windows Live Search logs (http://search.live.com/). Most of them were geographical queries. A sample labeled set of 100 queries were provided as a training set. This data set has been used in the geographic query parsing task of GeoCLEF 2007.

The query set is in XML format. Each query has two attributes: <QUERYNO> and <QUERY>.

<QUERY>Restaurant in Beijing, China</QUERY>

<QUERY>Real estate in Florida</QUERY>

<QUERY>Mountains in the south of United States</QUERY>

The sample labeled set is in the following format. There are 4 more attributes: <LOCAL>, <WHAT>, <WHAT_TYPE>, <GEO-RELATION> and <WHERE>.

<QUERY>Restaurant in Beijing, China</QUERY>

<WHAT>Restaurant</WHAT>

<WHAT-TYPE> Yellow page</WHAT-TYPE>

<GEO-RELATION>IN</ GEO-RELATION>

<WHERE>Beijing, China</WHERE>

<LAT-LONG>40.24, 116.42</LAT-LONG>

<QUERY> Lottery in Florida</QUERY>

<WHAT>Lottery</WHAT>

<WHAT-TYPE>Information</WHAT-TYPE>

<GEO-RELATION>IN</ GEO-RELATION>

<WHERE>Florida</WHERE>

<LAT-LONG>28.38, -81.75</LAT-LONG>

File Download

Data Set: 800,000 unlabeled queries and 100 labeled queries [download (zip, with password, 6.81M)]. Note: the data file has been encrypted, please contact xingx AT microsoft DOT com for password.
Evaluation Set: 500 labeled queries [download].

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