What aspects do people search in geo-referenced text?

Abstract

In providing a service to mobile users, it would be critical to know what types of information they would look for in association with geo-referenced entities that may be extractable from queries or contexts. While understanding high-level user intentions in accessing the Web, such as informational, navigational, and transactional, is useful, a finer-level classification of user interests would further help adapting mobile search results to user intensions. Our research focuses on understanding what aspects of geo-referenced entities are mentioned in user queries in an attempt to create a model for user intents in geo-referenced Web searching. By collecting and analyzing geo-referenced questions posed to operational question answering systems, we delineated major aspects of non-topical information that people would seek in association with geographic information. The identified aspects were further conceptualized to develop a user interest model with three dimensions, which was validated with two sets of data. The model can be a basis for identifying user's intent in a mobile search context as well as classifying geo-related text to be retrieved for its aspectual category.