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 semant...

In Härtl (2003)), it was shown that congruous pictures were size categorized – i.e. a conceptual task – slower than incongruous ones subsequent to a localization expression containing a prepositional phrase (as in to stick s.th. on the ...). No such difference showed up with the intransitive prepositional variants, i.e. particles as in to stick s.th. on. In the current study, transitive activit...

This paper presents a methodology to identify polysemous German prepositions by exploring their vector spatial properties. We apply two cluster evaluation metrics (the Silhouette Value (Kaufman and Rousseeuw, 1990) and a fuzzy version of the V-Measure (Rosenberg and Hirschberg, 2007)) as well as various correlations, to exploit hard vs. soft cluster analyses based on Self-Organising Maps. Our m...

We examine why a probabilistic approach to modelling the various components of spatial language is the most practical for spatial algorithms in which they can be employed, and examine such models for prepositions such as `between' and `by'. We provide an example of such a probabilistic treatment by exploring a novel application of spatial models to the induction of the occupancy of an object in...

We present an approach for enabling in-home service robots to follow natural language commands from non-expert users, with a particular focus on spatial language understanding. Specifically, we propose an extension to the semantic field model of spatial prepositions that enables the representation of dynamic spatial relations involving paths. The relevance of the proposed methodology to interac...

This paper explicates how English and Polish select different aspects of a spatial situation to express coincidence or proximity. Spatial relations verbalized by different senses of at in English are reflected primarily by means of w, na, przy and u in Polish. First, at is presented as conceptualizing the relation of coincidence or proximity with the whole Landmark (LM) when it is conceived as ...

In this paper we present a semantic study of motion complexes (ie. of a motion verb followed by a spatial preposition). We focus on the spatial and the temporal intrinsic semantic properties of the motion verbs, on the one hand, and of the spatial prepositions, on the other hand. Then we address the problem of combining these basic semantics in order to formally and automatically derive the spa...

Spatial prepositions such as in and on seem to denote semantically indeterminate spatial relations. This re ̄ects, in part, the physical relationships between the objects in the scenes that they are used to portray. We argue that such physical relationships are best represented in terms of an inherently dynamic functional geometry which incorporates notions of location control. Two experiments a...

We examine why a probabilistic approach to modelling the various components of spatial language is the most practical for spatial algorithms in which they can be employed, and examine such models for prepositions such as `between' and `by'. We provide an example of such a probabilistic treatment by exploring a novel application of spatial models to the induction of the occupancy of an object in...