Enhanced Address Search with Spelling Variants

Konstantin Clemens

2018

Abstract

The process of resolving names of spatial entities like postal addresses or administrative areas into their whereabouts is called geocoding. It is an error-prone process for multiple reasons: Names of postal address elements like cities, streets, or districts are often reused for historical reasons; structures of postal addresses are only coherent within countries or regions - around the globe addresses are not structured in a canonical way; human users might not adhere even to locally common format for specifying addresses; also, humans often introduce spelling mistakes when referring to a location. In this paper, a log of address searches from human users is used to model user behavior with regards to spelling mistakes. This model is used to generate spelling variants of address tokens which are indexed in addition to the proper spelling. Experiments show that augmenting the index of a geocoder with spelling variants is a valuable approach to handling queries with misspelled tokens. It enables the system to serve more such queries correctly as compared to a geocoding system supporting edit distances: While this way the recall of such a system is improved, its precision remains on par at the same time.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Clemens K. (2018). Enhanced Address Search with Spelling Variants.In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management - Volume 1: GISTAM, ISBN 978-989-758-294-3, pages 28-35. DOI: 10.5220/0006646100280035

in Bibtex Style

@conference{gistam18,
author={Konstantin Clemens},
title={Enhanced Address Search with Spelling Variants},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management - Volume 1: GISTAM,},
year={2018},
pages={28-35},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006646100280035},
isbn={978-989-758-294-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management - Volume 1: GISTAM,
TI - Enhanced Address Search with Spelling Variants
SN - 978-989-758-294-3
AU - Clemens K.
PY - 2018
SP - 28
EP - 35
DO - 10.5220/0006646100280035