Generation of Adaptive Route Descriptions in Urban Environments

This paper addresses the automatic generation of adaptive and cognitively adequate verbal route descriptions. Current automatic route descriptions suffer from a lack of adaptivity to the principles people employ in wayfinding communication, as well as to particular users’ information needs. We enhance adaptivity and cognitive adequacy by supplementing verbal route descriptions with salient geographic features, applying natural language generation techniques for linguistic realization. We also take users’ familiarity with an area into account. We present an architecture for navigational assistance operating on human cognitive and linguistic principles and report an evaluative user study that confirms the usefulness of our approach.