Joint Spatio-Textual Reasoning for Answering Tourism Questions

Abstract: Our goal is to answer real-world tourism questions that seek Points-of-Interest (POI) recommendations. Such questions express various kinds of spatial and non-spatial constraints, necessitating a combination of textual and spatial reasoning. In response, we develop the first joint spatio-textual reasoning model, which combines geo-spatial knowledge with information in textual corpora to answer questions. We first develop a modular spatial-reasoning network that uses geo-coordinates of location names mentioned in a question, and of candidate answer POIs, to reason over only spatial constraints. We then combine our spatial-reasoner with a textual reasoner in a joint model and present experiments on a real world POI recommendation task. We report substantial improvements over existing models with-out joint spatio-textual reasoning.