Querying tourism information systems in natural language

Abstract

With the increasing amount of information available on the Internet one of the most challenging tasks is to provide search interfaces that are easy to use without having to learn a specific syntax and provides a means for finding what they really want. In this paper we present a query interface for an information system in the tourism domain exploiting the intuitiveness of natural language. Furthermore, we will describe the results and our insights from analyzing the natural language queries collected during a field trial in which the interface was publicly accessible. This analysis shows how users formulate queries when their imagination is not limited by conventional search interfaces with structured forms consisting of check boxes, radio buttons and special-purpose text fields.