Loquat: An Interactive System Design for Location-Aware Query Autocompletion

Sheng Hu
2018 Journal of Advances in Computer Networks  
Query autocompletion (QAC) is the feature to provide the intended possible candidate completions given some initial prefixes from users. By applying QAC techniques, users are assisted in formulating queries and saving input keystrokes. Due to the convenience it brings to users, QAC has been adopted in many real-world applications, including search engines, integrated development environments (IDEs), and mobile devices. With the growing popularity of mobile devices, a recent trend is to
more » ... query autocompletion into location-based services, such as Web mapping and spatial keyword search. In this paper, we present an interactive system of location-aware query autocompletion called Loquat, which provides a graphical interface to help users easily formulate their location-aware queries. We develop novel index structures and search algorithms to make such an interactive system work efficiently. We extend our system to support fuzzy search and multiple-keyword search. We also define a new ranking function taking fuzzy threshold value into consideration. The experiments on two real-life datasets verify the efficiency and its interactive usability of our system.
doi:10.18178/jacn.2018.6.2.260 fatcat:vxcugb2ukjddpnsceiwkrz6wlm