Conference Papers

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Browsing Conference Papers by Author "Aflaki N"

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    Challenges in creating an annotated set of geospatial natural language descriptions
    (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2018-08-01) Aflaki N; Russell S; Stock K; Winter S; Griffin A; Sester M
    In order to extract and map location information from natural language descriptions, a first step is to identify different language elements within the descriptions. In this paper, we describe a method and discuss the challenges faced in creating an annotated set of geospatial natural language descriptions using manual tagging, with the purpose of supporting validation and machine learning approaches to annotation and text interpretation.
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    What Do You Mean You're in Trafalgar Square? Comparing Distance Thresholds for Geospatial Prepositions
    (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2022-09-01) Aflaki N; Stock K; Jones CB; Guesgen H; Morley J; Fukuzawa Y; Ishikawa T; Fabrikant SI; Winter S
    Natural language location descriptions frequently describe object locations relative to other objects (the house near the river). Geospatial prepositions (e.g.near) are a key element of these descriptions, and the distances associated with proximity, adjacency and topological prepositions are thought to depend on the context of a specific scene. When referring to the context, we include consideration of properties of the relatum such as its feature type, size and associated image schema. In this paper, we extract spatial descriptions from the Google search engine for nine prepositions across three locations, compare their acceptance thresholds (the distances at which different prepositions are acceptable), and study variations in different contexts using cumulative graphs and scatter plots. Our results show that adjacency prepositions next to and adjacent to are used for a large range of distances, in contrast to beside; and that topological prepositions in, at and on can all be used to indicate proximity as well as containment and collocation. We also found that reference object image schema influences the selection of geospatial prepositions such as near and in.