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Evaluation of a Semantic Similarity Measure for Natural Language Spatial Relations

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Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2007)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4736))

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Abstract

Consistent and flawless communication between humans and machines is the precondition for a computer to process instructions correctly. While machines use well-defined languages and formal rules to process information, humans prefer natural language expressions with vague semantics. Similarity comparisons are central to the human way of thinking: we use similarity for reasoning on new information or new situations by comparing them to knowledge gained from similar experiences in the past. It is necessary to overcome the differences in representing and processing information to avoid communication errors and computation failures. We introduce an approach to formalize the semantics of natural language spatial relations and specify it in a computational model which allows for similarity comparisons. This paper describes an experiment that investigates human similarity perception between spatial relations and compares it to the similarity determined by the our semantic similarity measure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrueck, Germany

    Angela Schwering

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  1. Angela Schwering
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Stephan Winter Matt Duckham Lars Kulik Ben Kuipers

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Schwering, A. (2007). Evaluation of a Semantic Similarity Measure for Natural Language Spatial Relations. In: Winter, S., Duckham, M., Kulik, L., Kuipers, B. (eds) Spatial Information Theory. COSIT 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4736. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74788-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74788-8_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-74786-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-74788-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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