The Case for Systematically Derived Spatial Language Usage

Bonnie Dorr, Clare Voss


Abstract
This position paper argues that, while prior work in spatial language understanding for tasks such as robot navigation focuses on mapping natural language into deep conceptual or non-linguistic representations, it is possible to systematically derive regular patterns of spatial language usage from existing lexical-semantic resources. Furthermore, even with access to such resources, effective solutions to many application areas such as robot navigation and narrative generation also require additional knowledge at the syntax-semantics interface to cover the wide range of spatial expressions observed and available to natural language speakers. We ground our insights in, and present our extensions to, an existing lexico-semantic resource, covering 500 semantic classes of verbs, of which 219 fall within a spatial subset. We demonstrate that these extensions enable systematic derivation of regular patterns of spatial language without requiring manual annotation.
Anthology ID:
W18-1408
Volume:
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans
Editors:
Parisa Kordjamshidi, Archna Bhatia, James Pustejovsky, Marie-Francine Moens
Venue:
SpLU
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
63–70
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-1408
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-1408
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bonnie Dorr and Clare Voss. 2018. The Case for Systematically Derived Spatial Language Usage. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding, pages 63–70, New Orleans. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Case for Systematically Derived Spatial Language Usage (Dorr & Voss, SpLU 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/W18-1408.pdf