From Spatial Relations to Spatial Configurations

Soham Dan, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Julia Bonn, Archna Bhatia, Zheng Cai, Martha Palmer, Dan Roth


Abstract
Spatial Reasoning from language is essential for natural language understanding. Supporting it requires a representation scheme that can capture spatial phenomena encountered in language as well as in images and videos. Existing spatial representations are not sufficient for describing spatial configurations used in complex tasks. This paper extends the capabilities of existing spatial representation languages and increases coverage of the semantic aspects that are needed to ground spatial meaning of natural language text in the world. Our spatial relation language is able to represent a large, comprehensive set of spatial concepts crucial for reasoning and is designed to support composition of static and dynamic spatial configurations. We integrate this language with the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) annotation schema and present a corpus annotated by this extended AMR. To exhibit the applicability of our representation scheme, we annotate text taken from diverse datasets and show how we extend the capabilities of existing spatial representation languages with fine-grained decomposition of semantics and blend it seamlessly with AMRs of sentences and discourse representations as a whole.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.717
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5855–5864
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.717
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Soham Dan, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Julia Bonn, Archna Bhatia, Zheng Cai, Martha Palmer, and Dan Roth. 2020. From Spatial Relations to Spatial Configurations. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5855–5864, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
From Spatial Relations to Spatial Configurations (Dan et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.717.pdf
Data
NLVR