Querying OSM with Natural Language

[Carolin Haas]

Hello OSM Devs!

we are sure that this idea has been in the air in the OSM development 
community for a while: An interface for querying OSM with natural 
language questions!

    Example question:  Which hotels in Paris have wheelchair access?
    Answer: Hôtel Montpensier, Hôtel Ibis Paris Avenue d'Italie, Le 
Grand Hôtel Intercontinental, …

On examples like this, we trained a semantic parser that can parse the 
natural language question into a representation that is mapped into the 
Overpass format (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API) which 
allows to access the OSM database:

    Example Query: 
findkey(area(keyval(name,'Paris')),node(keyval(tourism,'hotel'),keyval(wheelchair,'yes')),key(name))
    Overpass: 
area[name=“Paris”]→.a;node(area.a)[“tourism”=“hotel”][wheelchair=“yes”];out;

Our semantic parser is trained on 900 handcrafted examples on the 
geography of Heidelberg, Edinburgh, and Paris, and it is already able to 
parse a lot of previously unseen natural language questions to OSM. 
However, we need your help to ask more difficult and different questions.

For example, our queries revolve around OSM nodes such as hospitals, 
supermarkets, restaurants, peaks, hotels, etc. Can you think of other 
interesting nodes to query for?

Natural language allows to express fuzzy concepts, for example, "nearby" 
or "south of", that can be captured nicely by Overpass operators such as 
"around". Can you think of other interesting concepts that are best 
asked in terms of natural language?

Please have a look at the pipeline of our model (attached file 
“pipe.png”) and a suggestion for a little interface to the current 
openstreetmap website, asking volunteers to phrase their search intent 
in natural language (attached file “website_screenshot.png”).

Our goal is to first gather new natural language questions from OSM 
users, and then retrain our parser, and eventually release our system so 
that OSM users can search for information using natural language. Please 
let us know if you would support this and what would be the best way for 
us to get started.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Carolin & Stefan
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