English

Geographic Question Answering: Challenges, Uniqueness, Classification, and Future Directions

Computation and Language 2021-05-21 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

As an important part of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Question Answering (QA) aims at generating answers to questions phrased in natural language. While there has been substantial progress in open-domain question answering, QA systems are still struggling to answer questions which involve geographic entities or concepts and that require spatial operations. In this paper, we discuss the problem of geographic question answering (GeoQA). We first investigate the reasons why geographic questions are difficult to answer by analyzing challenges of geographic questions. We discuss the uniqueness of geographic questions compared to general QA. Then we review existing work on GeoQA and classify them by the types of questions they can address. Based on this survey, we provide a generic classification framework for geographic questions. Finally, we conclude our work by pointing out unique future research directions for GeoQA.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.09392,
  title  = {Geographic Question Answering: Challenges, Uniqueness, Classification, and Future Directions},
  author = {Gengchen Mai and Krzysztof Janowicz and Rui Zhu and Ling Cai and Ni Lao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.09392},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

20 pages, 3 figure, Full paper accepted to AGILE 2021

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:16:45.067Z