Geographic information retrieval to suit immediate surroundings

This paper proposes a highly effective geographic information retrieval method. It assesses the extent implied by place names in documents and then emphasizes place names that are highly specific in terms of identifying locations. Furthermore, the method also assesses the proximity between place names and keywords in each document and adjusts the document score based on the proximity between place name associated with user's geographic intention and keywords associated with user's query. Evaluation results show that the two methods proposed herein offer improved performance according to some TREC-style evaluation metrics.