Free Speech for Tourists

In this paper we report on the application of a natural language search interface in the tourism domain for searching accomodation throughout Austria. We describe the analysis of readl-world queries obtained by a field test where our interface has been made publicly available through the largest Austrian web-based tourism platform Tiscover. This analysis shows how users formulate queries when they are not limited by search interfaces with structured forms consisting of check boxes, radio buttons and special-purpose text fields.