TALP at GeoCLEF 2007: Using Terrier with Geographical Knowledge Filtering

This paper describes our experiments in Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) in the context of our participation in the GeoCLEF 2007 Monolingual English task. Our system, called TALPGeoIR, follows a similar architecture of our previous system presented at GeoCLEF 2006 [2] with some changes in the Retrieval modes and the Geographical Knowledge Base. The system has four phases performed sequentially: i) a Linguistic and Geographical Analysis of the topics, ii) a thematic Document Retrieval search with Terrier, iii) a Geographical Document Retrieval with Geographical Knowledge Bases, iv) a Document Filtering phase. Our experiments show that Geographical Knowledge Bases can be used to improve the retrieval results of the Terrier state-of-the-art IR system by filtering out non geographically relevant documents.