Abstract
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 new corpus of geo-analytic questions drawn from English textbooks and scientific articles. We analyse and compare this corpus with two general-purpose GeoQA corpora in terms of grammatical complexity and semantic concepts, using a new parsing method that allows us to differentiate and quantify patterns of a question’s intent.
Highlights
Questions about locations of places or events are frequent in Web search
Compared to current capabilities of search engines and QA systems, geo-analytic questions3 asked by professionals in Geography and the spatial sciences are 3 This term vaguely refers to the set of questions used in the context of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) analysis
We introduce GeoAnQu, a novel geo-analytic question corpus in English that can be used for non-factoid geographic question-answering systems (GeoQA) (Section 3)
Summary
Questions about locations of places or events are frequent in Web search. Only basic geographic questions, such as “Where is Fiji?”, were satisfactorily answered by search engines [15,22]. Driven primarily by the need to enable smart assistants, such as Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft), to answer situated questions, spatial question-answering (QA) has received increased attention in recent years [5]. Researchers have conducted studies about the form of spatial questions used in search engines [11]. Geographic question-answering systems (GeoQA) have become a topic of interest in GIScience [21]. Compared to current capabilities of search engines and QA systems, geo-analytic questions asked by professionals in Geography and the spatial sciences are 3 This term vaguely refers to the set of questions used in the context of GIS analysis
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