Handling Locations in Search Engine Queries

This paper proposes simple techniques for handling place references in search engine queries, an important aspect of geographical information retrieval. We address not only the detection, but also the disambiguation of place references, by matching them explicitly with concepts at an ontology. Moreover, when a query does not reference any locations, we propose to use information from documents matching the query, exploiting geographic scopes previously assigned to these documents. Evaluation experiments, using topics from CLEF campaigns and logs from real search engine queries, show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

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