John A. Bateman

Relating Spatial Language, Representation and Behaviour

 

 Abstract

Our work on extracting the linguistic semantic commitments of spatial
language has led us to a two-level approach to semantic interpretation
and generation that provides particular solutions in the area of
spatial language. More specifically, we adopt a primarily
grammatically-motivated abstraction covering the spatial commitments
of decontextualised language and then relate this to situated language
use in a separate step. The grammatically-motivated abstraction is
represented in terms of a linguistically-motivated ontology. This
allows us to explore the process of contextualisation as a case of
inter-ontology mapping. The two-level architecture supports a
decoupling of qualitative treatments of spatial context or behavioural
simulation on the one hand, and abstract linguistic spatial
configurations on the other. In the presentation, I will briefly set
out this approach to handling spatial language, suggest examples of
where it shows itself to be necessary, and discuss open problems and
research directions where empirical investigation needs to be taken
further.