Landmark Classification for Route Directions

In order for automated navigation systems to operate effectively, the route instructions they produce must be clear, concise and easily understood by users. In order to incorporate a landmark within a coherent sentence, it is necessary to first understand how that landmark is conceptualised by travellers — whether it is perceived as point-like, linelike or area-like. This paper investigates the viability of automatically classifying the conceptualisation of landmarks relative to a given city context. We use web data to learn the default conceptualisation of those landmarks, crucially analysing preposition and verb collocations in the classification.