Recursive construction of granular route directions

People give route directions to persons who are familiar with the environment typically by referring to elements of the city of varying granularity—what we call granular route directions. This is in contrast to current navigation services, which produce directions of constant granularity. In granular route directions the detail of the description is adapted to some relations between the start and target of the route. The references to elements of the city are aggregated to a referring expression respecting the conversation maxims formulated by Grice. We demonstrate how granular route directions can be automatically constructed by selecting appropriate elements of the city from a hierarchical city structure, and we further demonstrate that the process is based on a recursive application of a small set of topological rules.

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