Explicit Query Diversification for Geographical Information Retrieval

International audience; In this paper we make a first attempt to evaluate the potential of diversity in the Geographical Information Retrieval task. This task represent an opportunity to take advantage of diversity, given that documents are not relevant only from a thematic point of view, but also spatially. A user of a GIR system may be interested in results that are geographically distributed and equally relevant. We attempted to diversify results explicitly, reformulating queries with meronyms of the places contained in the original queries, with the help of a geographical ontology. The obtained results show that a theoretical improvement is possible, but this approach may be effective only in the case that the relevant documents do not contain enough geographical data.