Generating Simulations of Motion Events from Verbal Descriptions
This work addresses the challenge of visualizing and testing the semantics of motion verbs for researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, though it is incremental as it builds on prior models and focuses on an incomplete implementation.
The paper tackles the problem of generating 3D simulations from verbal descriptions of motion events by mapping linguistic expressions through dynamic interpretations into temporal simulations, resulting in a computational model that acts as a conceptual debugger for motion verb semantics.
In this paper, we describe a computational model for motion events in natural language that maps from linguistic expressions, through a dynamic event interpretation, into three-dimensional temporal simulations in a model. Starting with the model from (Pustejovsky and Moszkowicz, 2011), we analyze motion events using temporally-traced Labelled Transition Systems. We model the distinction between path- and manner-motion in an operational semantics, and further distinguish different types of manner-of-motion verbs in terms of the mereo-topological relations that hold throughout the process of movement. From these representations, we generate minimal models, which are realized as three-dimensional simulations in software developed with the game engine, Unity. The generated simulations act as a conceptual "debugger" for the semantics of different motion verbs: that is, by testing for consistency and informativeness in the model, simulations expose the presuppositions associated with linguistic expressions and their compositions. Because the model generation component is still incomplete, this paper focuses on an implementation which maps directly from linguistic interpretations into the Unity code snippets that create the simulations.