The Case for Systematically Derived Spatial Language Usage

This position paper argues that, while prior work in spatial language understanding for tasks such as robot navigation focuses on mapping natural language into deep conceptual or non-linguistic representations, it is possible to systematically derive regular patterns of spatial language usage from existing lexical-semantic resources. Furthermore, even with access to such resources, effective solutions to many application areas such as robot navigation and narrative generation also require additional knowledge at the syntax-semantics interface to cover the wide range of spatial expressions observed and available to natural language speakers. We ground our insights in, and present our extensions to, an existing lexico-semantic resource, covering 500 semantic classes of verbs, of which 219 fall within a spatial subset. We demonstrate that these extensions enable systematic derivation of regular patterns of spatial language without requiring manual annotation.