Using query reformulation and keywords in the geographic information retrieval task

Abstract

This paper describes the use of query reformulation to improve the Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) task. This technique also includes the geographic expansion of the topics. Moreover, several experiments related to the use of keywords and hyponyms in the filtering process are performed. We also use a new approach in the re-ranking process based on the original position of each document in the ranking. The results obtained show that our query reformulation sometimes retrieves valid documents that the default query is not able to find, but on average it does not improve the baseline case. The best result is obtained considering the geographic entities in the traditional retrieval process. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.