Mining query-driven contexts for geographic and temporal search created by Mariam Daoud &Jimmy Xiangji Huang

The explosive growth of geographic and temporal data has attracted much attention in information retrieval (IR) field. Since geographic and temporal information are often available in unstructured text, the IR task becomes a non-straightforward process. In this article, we propose a novel geo-temporal context mining approach and a geo-temporal ranking model for improving the search performance. Queries target implicitly ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’ components. We model geographic and temporal query-dependent frequent patterns, called contexts. These contexts are derived based on extracting and ranking geographic and temporal entities found in pseudo-relevance feedback documents. Two methods are proposed for inferring the query-dependent contexts: (1) a frequency-based statistical approach and (2) a frequent pattern mining approach using a support threshold. The derived geographic and temporal query contexts are then exploited into a probabilistic ranking model. Finally, geographic, temporal and content-based scores are combined together for improving the geo-temporal search performance. We evaluate our approach on the New York Times news collection. The experimental results show that our proposed approach outperforms significantly a well-known baseline search, namely the probabilistic BM25 ranking model and state-of-the-art approaches in the field as well.

Keywords: context-awa