Crosslingual location search

Address geocoding, the process of finding the map location for a structured postal address, is a relatively well-studied problem. In this paper we consider the more general problem of crosslingual location search, where the queries are not limited to postal addresses, and the language and script used in the search query is different from the one in which the underlying data is stored. To the best of our knowledge, our system is the first crosslingual location search system that is able to geocode complex addresses. We use a statistical machine transliteration system to convert location names from the script of the query to that of the stored data. However, we show that it is not sufficient to simply feed the resulting transliterations into a monolingual geocoding system, as the ambiguity inherent in the conversion drastically expands the location search space and significantly lowers the quality of results. The strength of our approach lies in its integrated, end-tore: we use abstract...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Tanuja Joshi, Joseph Joy, Tobias Kellner, Udayan Khurana, A. Kumaran, Vibhuti S. Sengar
• Keywords: Crosslingual Location Search, Information Technology, Location Search Space, SIGIR 2008, Structured Postal Address