Mae Carroll
2026
Where the Cat Sat: A Multilingual Framework for Spatial Language Understanding
Demian Inostroza | Ekaterina Vylomova | Charles Kemp | Mae Carroll | Wanchun Li | Meladel Mistica
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Demian Inostroza | Ekaterina Vylomova | Charles Kemp | Mae Carroll | Wanchun Li | Meladel Mistica
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Spatial language understanding is fundamental to tasks from robot navigation to document analysis, yet current work exhibits biases toward English and prepositional marking. We present a multilingual framework and benchmark decomposing spatial relations into surface elements (figure, ground, predicate, markers) and semantic components (dynamicity, stasis). Evaluating frontier LLMs on Spanish, Basque, and Chinese with text-only input, we find high accuracy on figure and ground identification but persistent gaps in two areas: semantic classification of topological and projective relations, and surface identification of morphological spatial markers—Basque case affixes proving most challenging at as low as 15.3%. These results suggest that surface parsing does not entail spatial understanding, and that evaluation must include typologically diverse spatial marking strategies.