NATURAL LANGUAGE-BASED TOUR DESTINATION RECOMMENDATION APPARATUS AND METHOD

• US 20110153654A1
• Filed: 12/15/2010
• Published: 06/23/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 12/18/2009
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
• Original Assignee: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute
• Inventors: LEE, Chung-Hee
• Application Number:
  US12/969,489
• Publication Number:
  US 20110153654A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/769
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/29 Geographical information databases
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/3344 using natural language analysis

Abstract

Disclosed herein is a natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus and method. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus includes a query analysis unit, a tour destination search unit, and a tour destination recommendation and provision unit. The query analysis unit performs linguistic analysis on a user'"'"'s tour-related query and then extracting query analysis information to be used for figuring out the user'"'"'s intention from a document index DB. The tour destination search unit searches a tour destination DB for one or more recommended tour destinations using the extracted query analysis information. The tour destination recommendation and provision unit provides the retrieved recommended tour destinations to the user.

Claims

1. A natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus, comprising:

a query analysis unit for performing linguistic analysis on a user'"'"'s tour-related query and then extracting query analysis information from a document index Database (DB) to be used for figuring out the user'"'"'s intention;

a tour destination search unit for searching a tour destination DB for one or more recommended tour destinations using the extracted query analysis information; and

a tour destination recommendation and provision unit for providing the retrieved recommended tour destinations to the user.

2. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 1, wherein the query analysis information comprises Point of Interest (POI) information, thematic information, regional information and/or other information.

3. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 1, wherein the recommended tour destinations comprise one or more region-based tour destinations, one or more theme-based tour destinations and/or one or more document searching-based tour destinations.

4. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 1, further comprising a tour destination prioritization unit for prioritizing the recommended tour destinations using reliability information of the document index DB.

5. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 4, wherein the reliability information comprises at least one of a document similarity score, a POI extraction reliability score, a tour destination reputation score, a tour information provision CP reliability score, a tour document-type reliability score, and other reliability scores.

6. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 4, wherein the tour destination prioritization unit filters out one or more tour destinations not corresponding to the user'"'"'s tour-related query from the recommended tour destinations.

7. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 1, further comprising a tour information extraction unit for classifying tour destinations on a theme or region basis and organizing the classified tour destinations into the tour destination DB.

8. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 1, further comprising a document index unit for extracting an index term, a representative POI, document reliability and/or reputation information from each tour document and organizing the extracted information into the document index DB.

9. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 1, wherein the query analysis unit comprises:

a query linguistic analysis unit for performing linguistic analysis on the user'"'"'s tour-related query using morpheme analysis and named entity recognition;

a POI extraction unit for extracting POIs appearing in the user'"'"'s tour-related query using the linguistic analysis results;

a theme extraction unit for extracting thematic information of the user'"'"'s tour-related query using the linguistic analysis results; and

a region extraction unit for extracting regional limitation information of the user'"'"'s tour-related query using the linguistic analysis results.

10. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 9, wherein the query analysis unit further comprises an other information extraction unit for extracting one or more query term or stop words using the linguistic analysis results so that they can be used for document searching for the user'"'"'s tour-related query document.

11. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 1, wherein the tour destination search unit comprises:

a region-based tour destination search unit for searching for tour destinations in a corresponding region based on regional limitation information of the user'"'"'s tour-related query; and

a theme-based tour destination search unit for searching for tour destinations related to a corresponding theme using thematic information of the user'"'"'s tour-related query.

12. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 11, wherein the tour destination search unit further comprises a document-based tour destination search unit for searching for representative Points of Interest (POIs) of one or more corresponding tour documents based on the query term or stop word information of the user'"'"'s tour-related query.

13. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 12, wherein the tour destination search unit further comprises a tour destination filtering unit for filtering out tour destinations not common to the retrieved groups of tour destination results.

14. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 4, wherein the tour destination prioritization unit comprises:

a document similarity-based prioritization unit for incorporating a similarity score of each tour document into reliability of a corresponding one of the recommended tour destinations;

a POI extraction reliability-based prioritization unit for incorporating extraction reliability of a POI extracted from each tour document into reliability of a corresponding one of the recommended tour destinations;

a tour destination reputation-based prioritization unit for incorporating reputation information of a tour destination in each document into reliability of a corresponding one of the recommended tour destinations;

a tour information provision CP-based prioritization unit for incorporating reliability information of a professional tourist agency providing each piece of tour destination information into reliability of a corresponding one of the recommended tour destinations;

a tour document type-based prioritization unit for incorporating a predetermined reliability score into reliability of a corresponding one of the recommended tour destinations a type of document retrieved by the document-based tour destination search unit; and

an other information-based prioritization unit for incorporating additional tour destination-related information, such as image information, address information, user review information and/or user rating information, into reliability of a corresponding one of the recommended tour destinations.

15. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 8, wherein the document index unit comprises:

a document linguistic analysis unit for performing morpheme analysis and named entity recognition on refined documents provided by professional tourist agencies or web tour documents automatically collected from a web;

an index term extraction unit for extracting significant keywords useful for searching using linguistic analysis results;

a representative POI extraction unit for extracting POIs appearing in the documents, prioritizing the extracted POIs, and choosing principal POIs representative of the documents;

a document reliability extraction unit for calculating reliability of the documents themselves based on sources, dates and document quality scores of the documents; and

a reputation information extraction unit for extracting user reputation information from objects appearing in the documents and calculating reputation scores of the POIs.

16. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation apparatus as set forth in claim 15, wherein the document index unit further comprises an inverted index DB creation unit for constructing an inverted index DB so that all the extracted information can be used for searching.

17. A natural language-based tour destination recommendation method, comprising:

performing linguistic analysis on a user'"'"'s tour-related query and then extracting query analysis information to be used for figuring out the user'"'"'s intention from a document index DB;

searching a tour destination DB for one or more recommended tour destinations using the extracted query analysis information; and

providing the retrieved recommended tour destinations to the user.

18. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation method as set forth in claim 17, wherein the query analysis information comprises POI information, thematic information, regional information and/or other information.

19. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation method as set forth in claim 17, wherein the recommended tour destinations comprise one or more region-based tour destinations, one or more theme-based tour destinations and/or one or more document searching-based tour destinations.

20. The natural language-based tour destination recommendation method as set forth in claim 17, further comprising prioritizing the recommended tour destinations using reliability information of the document index DB.