RI: Small: Interpreting Linguistic Spatiotemporal Relations in Static and Dynamic Contexts

Brandeis University, Waltham MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project focuses on the development of a framework for interpreting linguistic descriptions of places and locations as well as objects in motion found in natural language texts. The resulting static and dynamic descriptions are represented in a spatiotemporal markup language called STML, which will be incorporated into a proposed international standard for spatial annotation called ISO-Space. The STML output then enables for grounding within a metric representation such as Google Earth, through an automatic conversion to KML. A Dynamic Interval Temporal Logic (DITL) is also developed, which is consistent with the STML output and which provides the semantics for STML for subsequent reasoning about the text. In order to automatically capture locations, paths, and motion constructions in the text, spatial processing algorithms are created. These algorithms build on earlier work on temporal processing as well as new and continuing work on identifying places, analyzing the internal structure of events with the Event Structure Lexicon, and adding paths with the PathFinder algorithm. Manual STML annotation is performed on a corpus of travel descriptions in order to evaluate these algorithms. This work is directly relevant to current efforts to standardize semantic annotations while also creating interoperable resources. One major impact of this research is the engagement of several diverse communities and their resources into a new dialogue and sharing of ideas. These include the areas of computational semantics and linguistics, qualitative reasoning, and dynamic approaches to logic and reasoning.