Geographical Query reformulation using a Geographical Taxonomy and WordNet

Effective geographical query formulation is one of the key difficulties for users in search engines. Our main motivation in this paper is to identify an opportunity for improving geographical search and related technologies. Thus, this work introduces, an approach for geographical query reformulation (GQR), which combines a method of queries' components separation that uses GeoNames, and a technique for reformulating these components using WordNet and a geographic taxonomy constructed using the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) method. In our experiments, we varied the taxonomies construction parameters, like the number of used documents, then we compare the values that are returned in every case. Furthermore, we compared the results of our approach to two methods from the literature, using the Mean Average Precision (MAP) and the precision at 10 documents (P@10). According to our results, reformulating geographical queries using the new proposed approach improves considerably the precision of queries and retrieves relevant documents that were not retrieved using the original queries.