Coping with the Intrinsic and Deictic Uses of Spatial Prepositions

This paper1 deals with the definition of a computational semantics for spatial relations between objects in a scene. In particular we examine the effects of the observer's position on the computation of spatial relations, the use of path prepositions, and degrees of applicability for spatial relations. Representational prerequisites and the computational analysis of spatial relations are investigated in the German dialogue system CITYTOUR. This paper appeared in: K. Jorrand and L. Sgurev (eds.), Artificial Intelligence II: Methodology, Systems, Applications, pp. 375–382. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1987. 1This report describes work done in the project VITRA, which is part of the SFB 314 Research Program of the Science Foundation (DFG) on AI and Knowledge-Based Systems.