MIRACLE at GeoCLEF Query Parsing 2007: Extraction and Classification of Geographical Information

This paper describes the participation of MIRACLE research consortium at the Query Parsing task of GeoCLEF 2007. Our system is composed of three main modules. The first one is the Named Geo-entity Identifier, whose objective is to perform the geo-entity identification and tagging, i.e., to extract the “where” component of the geographical query, if there is any. Then, the Query Analyzer parses this tagged query to identify the “what” and “geo-relation” components by means of a rule-based grammar. Finally, a two-level multiclassifier first decides whether the query is indeed a geographical query and, should it be positive, then determines the query type according to the type of information that the user is supposed to be looking for: map, yellow page or information.