Natural Language and Spatial Rules
This work addresses the challenge of bridging language and perception for researchers in computational linguistics and spatial reasoning, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing models and formalisms.
The paper tackles the problem of formally representing spatial semantics in natural language descriptions of spatial arrangements, resulting in a system that successfully parses various types of natural language descriptions of shapes by combining spatial semantics with shape grammar formalism.
We develop a system that formally represents spatial semantics concepts within natural language descriptions of spatial arrangements. The system builds on a model of spatial semantics representation according to which words in a sentence are assigned spatial roles and the relations among these roles are represented with spatial relations. We combine our system with the shape grammar formalism that uses shape rules to generate languages (sets) of two-dimensional shapes. Our proposed system consists of pairs of shape rules and verbal rules where the verbal rules describe in English the action of the associated shape rule. We present various types of natural language descriptions of shapes that are successfully parsed by our system and we discuss open questions and challenges we see at the interface of language and perception.