A Synergistic Framework for Geographic Question Answering

QA (question answering) systems designated for answering in-depth geographic questions are highly demanded but not quite available. Previous research has visited various individual aspects of a QA system but few synergistic frameworks have been proposed. This paper investigates the nature of geographic question formation and observes their unique linguistic structures that can be semantically translated into a spatial query. We create a new task of solving non-trivial questions using GIS (Geographic Information System) and test it with an associated corpus. A dynamic programming algorithm is developed for classification and voting algorithm for verification. Two types of ontologies are integrated for disambiguating and discriminating spatial terms. PostGIS serves as the GIS backend to provide domain expertise for spatial reasoning. Results show that exact answers can be returned quickly and correctly by our system. Contrast classification results in improved accuracy compared with the baseline which proves the effectiveness of proposed methods.