Contextual Adaptability of Navigational Spatial Descriptions: A Pragmatic Comparison

Different forms of spatial descriptions are used to communicate information in the context of navigation in urban environments. When generated by computers, such descriptions are combinations of map features in a predefined way. Unlike computers, however, people are capable of flexibly generating navigational spatial descriptions by taking into account a wide array of different contextual factors, e.g. a user’s prior knowledge and the structure of the environment. This paper deploys the notion of pragmatics to compare formal addresses, route descriptions (generated either by computers or humans), and destination descriptions in terms of their adaptability to contextual factors in order to identify the means to creating more cognitively sound information systems.

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