US 12,638,306 B2 · Automated tool for determining and providing building information for multiple partially described proximate geographical regions

Abstract

Techniques are described for performing automated operations related to determining and providing information about buildings in multiple geographical regions in response to a query with partial descriptions of the regions and optionally partial descriptions of one or more additional locations in the regions, such as to automatically respond to a free-form natural language request having partial descriptions of names of multiple proximate geographical regions and of one or more point-of-interest (POI) locations by determining the intended geographical regions and POI locations and using them in generating corresponding response information. The described techniques may do inter-position distance filtering for at least some combinations of geographical region candidates and POI location candidates, and using a top-ranked combination that has a candidate for each geographical region and POI location designation in the query to determine responsive information for the received query.

A computer-implemented method comprising:

receiving, by one or more computing devices, a user query for information about buildings matching multiple specified search criteria, the multiple specified search criteria represented using a sequence of a plurality of freeform terms submitted using a natural language interface;
segmenting, by the one or more computing devices, the sequence of the plurality of freeform terms into multiple segments each having one or more terms, the multiple segments including a first segment having an incomplete designation of a first geographical region that lacks a unique identification of that first geographical region, and a second segment having an incomplete designation of a second geographical region that lacks a unique identification of that second geographical region, and a third segment having an incomplete designation of a point-of-interest location that lacks a unique identification of that point-of-interest location;
determining, by the one or more computing devices, a first plurality of distinct geographical regions that each has a name matching the incomplete designation of the first geographical region in the first segment, including searching one or more first groups of stored information about geographical region names;
determining, by the one or more computing devices, a second plurality of distinct geographical regions that each has a name matching the incomplete designation of the second geographical region in the second segment, including searching the one or more first groups of stored information about the geographical region names;
determining, by the one or more computing devices, a plurality of point-of-interest locations that each has a name matching the incomplete designation of the point-of-interest location in the third segment, including searching one or more second groups of stored information about point-of-interest location names;
determining, by the one or more computing devices and using the first plurality of distinct geographical regions and the second plurality of distinct geographical regions and the plurality of point-of-interest locations, two or more geographical regions that match the multiple specified search criteria, including:
(a) generating, by the one or more computing devices, a plurality of location combinations for all pairs of the first and second plurality of distinct geographical regions, each location combination including a first geographical location associated with one of the first plurality of distinct geographical regions and a second geographical location associated with one of the second plurality of distinct geographical regions;
(b) determining, by the one or more computing devices and for each of the plurality of location combinations, distances between geographical locations included in that location combination;
(c) determining, by the one or more computing devices, multiple location combination candidates from the plurality of location combinations having determined distances satisfying one or more defined distance criteria;
(d) ranking, by the one or more computing devices, the multiple location combination candidates using one or more defined ranking criteria that are not based on geographical distance;
(e) selecting, by the one or more computing devices, a defined quantity of multiple of the ranked multiple location combination candidates having highest rankings;
(f) generating, by the one or more computing devices, a plurality of new location combinations for all pairs of the plurality of point-of-interest locations and the selected multiple location combinations, each new location combination including the first and second geographical locations for one of the selected multiple location combination candidates and further including a third geographical location that is one of plurality of point-of-interest locations;
(g) performing, by the one or more computing devices, elements (b) and (c) and (d) for the plurality of new location combinations to provide ranked new location combination candidates;
and
selecting, by the one or more computing devices and based at least in part on a highest ranked one of the ranked new location combination candidates, the determined two or more geographical regions based at least in part on the first and second and third geographical locations for a highest ranked one new location combination candidate;
determining, by the one or more computing devices, one or more buildings located in the determined two or more geographical regions that satisfy the multiple specified search criteria;
and
presenting, by the one or more computing systems, search results for the user query that include information about the determined one or more buildings.

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Automated tool for determining and providing building information for multiple partially described proximate geographical regions

Life of this patent

Automated tool for determining and providing building information for multiple partially described proximate geographical regions

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims23