Extracting interrogative intents and concepts from geo-analytic questions

Abstract

Understanding syntactic and semantic structure of geographic questions is a necessary step towards true geographic question-answering (GeoQA) machines. The empirical basis for the understanding of the capabilities expected from GeoQA systems are geographic question corpora. Available corpora in English have been mostly drawn from generic Web search logs or limited user studies, supporting the focus of GeoQA systems on retrieving factoids: factual knowledge about particular places and everyday processes. Yet, the majority of questions enquired about in the spatial sciences go beyond simple place facts, with more complex analytical intents informing the questions. In this paper, we introduce a..