Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications

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    Extracting interrogative intents and concepts from geo-analytic questions
    Xu, H ; Hamzei, E ; Nyamsuren, E ; Kruiger, H ; Winter, S ; Tomko, M ; Scheider, S (Copernicus GmbH, 2020)
    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.
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    Place facets: a systematic literature review
    Hamzei, E ; Winter, S ; Tomko, M (Taylor & Francis, 2020)
    Place is a central concept in geography and a topic of interest in the social sciences, urban planning, architecture, and most recently in information science. The notion of place has therefore been studied with different foci of interest. Consequently, heterogeneous terminologies, conceptualizations, models, and ontologies have been proposed to capture this elusive concept. Yet these studies complement each other. Utilizing the concept of place facet as a particular type of information about place, in this review paper we bridge these multidisciplinary studies about place. We collect the different facets of place introduced in the literature and synthesize place characteristics by categorizing the identified facets. Finally, we discuss future directions for place-related research.
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    Place questions and human-generated answers: A data analysis approach
    Hamzei, E ; Li, H ; Vasardani, M ; Baldwin, T ; Winter, S ; Tomko, M ; Kyriakidis, P ; Hadjimitsis, D ; Skarlatos, D ; Mansourian, A (Springer, Cham, 2020-01-01)
    This paper investigates place-related questions submitted to search systems and their human-generated answers. Place-based search is motivated by the need to identify places matching some criteria, to identify them in space or relative to other places, or to characterize the qualities of such places. Human place-related questions have thus far been insufficiently studied and differ strongly from typical keyword queries. They thus challenge today’s search engines providing only rudimentary geographic information retrieval support. We undertake an analysis of the patterns in place-based questions using a large-scale dataset of questions/answers, MS MARCO V2.1. The results of this study reveal patterns that can inform the design of conversational search systems and in-situ assistance systems, such as autonomous vehicles.