This paper explores the notion of spatial expression understanding relative to a domain. A model for spatial expression understanding is proposed, and ways in which domain speci c information can be incorporated at di erent stages of the model are discussed. We describe the domain of newspaper captions and show that spatial information in this domain is primarily expressed in the open class and...

This chapter proposes a conception of lexical meaning as use-potential, in contrast to prevailing atomistic and reificational views. The issues are illustrated on the example of spatial expressions, pre-eminently prepositions. It is argued that the dichotomy between polysemy and semantic generality is a false one, with expressions occupying points on a continuum from full homonymy to full monos...

Lexical pragmatics starts from the assumption that the meaning communicated by a word is underdetermined by its semantics, and lexical pragmatists usually study the processes involved in bridging the gap between the encoded and the communicated meaning of words. This paper studies a di erent but related question: wether di erent types of linguistic encoding can play empirically distinguishable ...

A novel combination of ideas from cognitive linguistics and spatial occupancy models in robotics has led to the WIP (Words Into Pictures) system. WIP automatically generates depictions of natural language descriptions of indoor scenes. A qualitative layer in the conceptual representation of objects underlies a mechanism by which alternative depictions arise for qualitatively distinct interpreta...

The present work is concerned with projective prepositions, which express the relation between two objects by referring to a direction in three-dimensional space. The projective prepositions have been regarded as expressing simple schematic relations of a geometric nature. A theory of the apprehension of projective relations can account for their meanings when they express strictly geometric re...

This paper describes a neural network model for the study of spatial language. It deals with both geometric and functional variables, which have been shown to play an important role in the comprehension of spatial prepositions. The network is integrated with a virtual reality interface for the direct manipulation of geometric and functional factors. The training uses experimental stimuli and da...

Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name (This is a corp!) or a spatial-relational term (This is acorp my box!)....

In this paper, a retrieval-based caption generation system that searches the web for suitable image descriptions is studied. Google’s search-by-image is used to find potentially relevant web multimedia content for query images. Sentences are extracted from web pages and the likelihood of the descriptions is computed to select one sentence from the retrieved text documents. The search mechanism ...