0000000000850692
AUTHOR
Mohamed Abdel Maksoud
Finding Tours for a Set of Interests
This paper addresses a novel tour discovery problem in the domain of travel search. We create a ranking of tours for a set of travel interests, where a tour is a group of city documents and a travel interest is a query. While generating and ranking tours, it is aimed that each interest (from the interest set) is satisfied by at least one city in a tour and the distance traveled to cover the tour is not too large. Firstly, we generate tours for the interest set, by utilizing the available ranking of cities for the individual interests and the distances between the cities. Then, in absence of existing methods directly related to our problem, we devise our novel techniques to calculate ranking…
CitySearcher: A City Search Engine For Interests
We introduce CitySearcher, a vertical search engine that searches for cities when queried for an interest. Generally in search engines, utilization of semantics between words is favorable for performance improvement. Even though ambiguous query words have multiple semantic meanings, search engines can return diversified results to satisfy different users' information needs. But for CitySearcher, mismatched semantic relationships can lead to extremely unsatisfactory results. For example, the city Sale would incorrectly rank high for the interest shopping because of semantic interpretations of the words. Thus in our system, the main challenge is to eliminate the mismatched semantic relationsh…