Tagging Address Queries in Maps Search

Abstract

Map search is a major vertical in all popular search engines. It also plays an important role in personal assistants on mobile, home or desktop devices. A significant fraction of map search traffic is comprised of “address queries” - queries where either the entire query or some terms in it refer to an address or part of an address (road segment, intersection etc.). Here we demonstrate that correctly understanding and tagging address queries are critical for map search engines to fulfill them. We describe several recurrent sequence architectures for tagging such queries. We compare their performance on two subcategories of address queries - single entity (aka single point) addresses and multi entity (aka multi point) addresses, and finish by providing guidance on the best practices when dealing with each of these subcategories.