Kenny R. Coventry - Böcker

This book considers how people talk about the location of objects and places. Spatial language has occupied many researchers across diverse fields, such as linguistics, psychology, GIScience, architecture, and neuroscience. However, the vast majority of work in this area has examined spatial language in monologue situations, and often in highly artificial and restricted settings. Yet there is a growing recognition in the language research community that dialogue rather than monologue should be a starting point for language understanding. Hence, the current zeitgeist in both language research and robotics/AI demands an integrated examination of spatial language in dialogue settings. The present volume provides such integration for the first time and reports on the latest developments in this important field. Written in a way that will appeal to researchers across disciplines from graduate level upwards, the book sets the agenda for future research in spatial conceptualization and communication.

Our use of spatial prepositions carries an implicit understanding of the functional relationships both between objects themselves and human interaction with those objects.This is the thesis rigorously explicated in Saying, Seeing and Acting. It aims to account not only for our theoretical comprehension of spatial relations but our ability to intercede with efficacy in the world of spatially related objects. Only the phenomenon of functionality can adequately account for what even the simplest of everyday experiences show to be the technically problematic, but still meaningful status of expressions of spatial location in contentious cases.The terms of the debate are established and contextualised in Part One. In the Second Section, systematic experimental evidence is drawn upon to demonstrate specific covariances between spatial world and spatial language. The authors go on to give an original account of the functional and geometric constraints on which comprehension and human action among spatially related objects is based. Part Three looks at the interaction of these constraints to create a truly dynamic functional geometric framework for the meaningful use of spatial prepositions.Fascinating to anyone whose work touches on psycholinguistics, this book represents a thorough and incisive contribution to debates in the cognitive psychology of language.

People constantly talk to each other about experience or knowledge resulting from spatial perception; they describe the size, shape, orientation and position of objects using a wide range of spatial expressions. The semantic treatment of such expressions presents particular challenges for natural language processing. The meaning representation used must be capable of distinguishing between fine-grained sense differences and ambiguities grounded in our experience and perceptual structure. While there have been many different approaches to the representation and processing of spatial expressions, most computational characterizations have been restricted to particularly narrow problem domains. The chapters in this volume reflect a commitment to the development of cognitively informed computational treatments of spatial language and spatatial representation. Therefore, the chapters present computational work, empirical work, or a combination of both.

Our use of spatial prepositions carries an implicit understanding of the functional relationships both between objects themselves and human interaction with those objects.This is the thesis rigorously explicated in Saying, Seeing and Acting. It aims to account not only for our theoretical comprehension of spatial relations but our ability to intercede with efficacy in the world of spatially related objects. Only the phenomenon of functionality can adequately account for what even the simplest of everyday experiences show to be the technically problematic, but still meaningful status of expressions of spatial location in contentious cases.The terms of the debate are established and contextualised in Part One. In the Second Section, systematic experimental evidence is drawn upon to demonstrate specific covariances between spatial world and spatial language. The authors go on to give an original account of the functional and geometric constraints on which comprehension and human action among spatially related objects is based. Part Three looks at the interaction of these constraints to create a truly dynamic functional geometric framework for the meaningful use of spatial prepositions.Fascinating to anyone whose work touches on psycholinguistics, this book represents a thorough and incisive contribution to debates in the cognitive psychology of language.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, CONTEXT 2011, held in Karlsruhe, Germany in September 2011. The 17 full papers and 7 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 54 submissions. In addition the book contains two keynote speeches and 8 poster papers. They cover cutting-edge results from the wide range of disciplines concerned with context, including the cognitive sciences (linguistics, psychology, philosophy, computer science, neuroscience), the social sciences and organization sciences, and all application areas.