A model of spatial reference frames in language

  • Authors:

  • Thora Tenbrink;Werner Kuhn

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Bremen, University of Münster, Germany;University of Bremen, University of Münster, Germany

  • Venue:
  • COSIT'11 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Spatial information theory
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We provide a systematic model of spatial reference frames. The model captures concepts underlying natural language expressions in English that represent both external and internal as well as static and dynamic relationships between entities. Our implementation in the functional language Haskell generates valid English sentences from situations and reference frames. Spatial reference frames are represented by the spatial roles of locatum, relatum, and, optionally, vantage, together with a directional system. Locatum, relatum, and vantage can be filled by entities taking on the discourse roles of speaker, addressee, and participant (grammatically expressed by first, second, and third person). Each of these roles may remain unspecified in a linguistic description.