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Location-based information contained in publicly available GIS databases is invaluable for many applications such as disaster response, national infrastructure protection, crime analysis, and numerous others. The information entities of such databases have both spatial and textual descriptions. Likewise, queries issued to the databases also contain spatial and textual components, for example, "Find shelters with emergency medical facilities in Orange County," or "Find earthquake-prone zones in Southern California." We refer to such queries as spatial-keyword queries or SK queries for short. In recent times, a lot of interest has been generated in efficient processing of SK queries for a variety of applications from Web-search to GIS decision support systems. We refer to systems built for enabling such applications as Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) Systems. An example GIR system that we address in this …