Automatic Text-to-Scene Conversion in the Traffic Accident Domain

In this paper, we describe a system that automatically converts narratives into 3D scenes. The texts, written in Swedish, describe road accidents. One of the program's key features is that it animates the generated scene using temporal relations between the events. We believe that this system is the first text-to-scene converter that is not restricted to invented narratives. The system consists of three modules: natural language interpretation based on information extraction (IE) methods, a planning module that produces a geometric description of the accident, and finally a visualization module that renders the geometric description as animated graphics. An evaluation of the system was carried out in two steps: First, we used standard IE scoring methods to evaluate the language interpretation. The results are on the same level as for similar systems tested previously. Secondly, we performed a small user study to evaluate the quality of the visualization. The results validate our choice of methods, and since this is the first evaluation of a text-to-scene conversion system, they also provide a baseline for further studies.