Dittrich, Andre, Maria Vasardani, Stephan Winter, Timothy Baldwin and Fei Liu (2015) A Classifiation Schema for Fast Disambiguation of Spatial Prepositions, in Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on GeoStreaming (IWGS), Seattle, USA

In the field of Artificial Intelligence the task of spatial language understanding is a particularly complex one. Textual spatial information is frequently represented by socalled locative expressions, incorporating spatial prepositions. However, apart from the spatial domain, these prepositions can occur in a wide range of senses (e.g., temporal, manner, cause, instrument) as well as in semantically transformed senses (e.g., metaphors and metonymies). Existing practical approaches usually disregard semantic transformations or falsely classify them as spatial, although they represent the majority of cases. For the efficient extraction of locative expressions from data streams (e.g. from social media sources), a fast filter mechanism for this nonspatial information is needed. Hence, we present a classification schema to quickly and robustly disambiguate spatial from non-spatial uses of prepositions. We conduct an interannotator agreement test to highlight the feasibility and comprehensibility of our schema based on examples sourced from a large social media corpus. We further identify the most promising existing natural language processing tools in order to combine machine learning features with fixed rules. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. IWGS’15, November 03-06 2015, Bellevue, WA, USA Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-3971-1/15/11 ...$15.00 DOI: http://dxdoi.org/10.1145/2833165.2833167.