Journal Articles

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/7915

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    Detecting the geospatialness of prepositions from natural language text
    (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2019-09-01) Radke M; Das P; Stock K; Jones CB; Timpf S; Schlieder C; Kattenbeck M; Ludwig B; Stewart K
    There is increasing interest in detecting the presence of geospatial locative expressions that include spatial relation terms such as near or within . Being able to do so provides a foundation for interpreting relative descriptions of location and for building corpora that facilitate the development of methods for spatial relation extraction and interpretation. Here we evaluate the use of a spatial role labelling procedure to distinguish geospatial uses of prepositions from other spatial and non-spatial uses and experiment with the use of additional machine learning features to improve the quality of detection of geospatial prepositions. An annotated corpus of nearly 2000 instances of preposition usage was created for training and testing the classifiers.
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    Cross-corpora analysis of spatial language: The case of fictive motion
    (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, 2019-09-01) Egorova E; Aflaki N; Marchis Fagundes CK; Stock K
    The way people describe where things are is one of the central questions of spatial information theory and has been the subject of considerable research. We investigate one particular type of location description, fictive motion (as in, The range runs along the coast). The use of this structure is known to highlight particular properties of the described entity, as well as to convey its configuration in physical space in an effective way. We annotated 496 fictive motion structures in seven corpora that represent different types of spatial discourse - news, travel blogs, texts describing outdoor pursuits and local history, as well as image and location descriptions. We analysed the results not only by examining the distribution of fictive motion structures across corpora, but also by exploring and comparing the semantic categories of verbs used in fictive motion. Our findings, first, add to our knowledge of location description strategies that go beyond prototypical locative phrases. They further reveal how the use of fictive motion varies across types of spatial discourse and reflects the nature of the described environment. Methodologically, we highlight the benefits of a cross-corpora analysis in the study of spatial language use across a variety of contexts.