POI Atmosphere Categorization Using Web Search Session Behavior

Point Of Interest (POI) categorization is to group POIs into several categories and make them easy-to-use in geospatial applications. Previous studies mainly used geospatial features, such as check-in sequences and satellite images, to group POIs into pre-defined rough categories. However, each POI has its own "atmosphere" beyond its geospatial features, which represents what kinds of people tend to visit it and how they spend their time there. This subtle atmosphere is important for users to decide whether to visit the POI, so considering it may be critical when providing commercial services, such as a property search service. In this paper, we propose a new POI categorization method that can capture the POI atmosphere by using user behavior on a web search engine. Our key observation is that the next queries of a search query about a POI tend to contain the user's purpose for visiting it. We harness this observation to train a neural encoder that maps POIs to continuous vectors (called embeddings) via next-query prediction with a deep structured semantic model (DSSM). Experimental results indicate that our method performs well for POI atmosphere categorization of parks as a case study. We believe that our method complements the existing POI categorization methods.