Personalized route description based on historical trajectories

Abstract

The turn-by-turn route descriptions provided in the existing navigation applications are exclusively derived from underlying road network topology information, i.e., the connectivity of edges to each other. Therefore, the turn-by-turn route descriptions are simplified as metric translation of physical world (e.g. distance/time to turn) to spoken language. Such translation that ignores human cognition of the geographic space, is frequently verbose and redundant for the drivers who have knowledge of the geographical areas. In this paper, we study a Personalized Route Description system dubbed PerRD - with which the goal is to generate more customized and intuitive route descriptions based on user generated content. PerRD utilizes a wealth of user generated historical trajectory data to extract frequently visited routes in the road network. The extracted information is used to make cognitive customized route description for each user. We formalize this task as a problem of finding the optimal partition for a given route that maximizes the familiarity while minimizing the number of partitions, and finding a proper sentence to describe each partition. For empirical study, our solution is applied to three trajectory datasets and users' real experiences to evaluate the performance and effectiveness of PerRD.