Annotation of Spatial Relations in Natural Language

Natural language spatial relations have drawn much attention in recent years for bridging the gap between natural language and geographical information systems. Annotating spatial relations in corpora is the precondition for resolution of geographical information in text. This paper proposes an annotation scheme for marking expressions of spatial relations in natural language. This scheme is based on a hierarchical classification of geographical feature types and spatial relations. An annotation approach is illustrated with examples of Chinese text, and finally the natural language processing tool GATE is used to test the proposed scheme. This work can be useful for disambiguation of natural language spatial relations, integration of natural language with GIS services and spatial reasoning.