Learning to interpret spatial natural language in terms of qualitative spatial relations*

Abstract

Computational approaches in spatial language understanding nowadays distinguish and use different aspects of spatial and contextual information. These aspects comprise linguistic grammatical features, qualitative formal representations, and situational context-aware data. In this chapter, we apply formal models and machine learning techniques to map spatial semantics in natural language to qualitative spatial representations. In particular, we investigate whether and how well linguistic features can be classified and automatically extracted and mapped to region-based qualitative relations using corpus-based learning. We separate the challenge of spatial language understanding into two tasks: (i) we identify and automatically extract those parts from linguistic utterances that provide specifically spatial information, and (ii) we map the extracted parts that result from the first task to qualitative spatial representations. In this chapter, we present both tasks and we particularly discuss experimental results of the second part of mapping linguistic features to qualitative spatial relations. Our results show that region-based spatial relations can indeed be learned to a high degree and that they are distinguishable on the basis of different linguistic features.