Natural Language Understanding of Spatial Relations Between Linear Geographic Objects

In order to bridge the gap between natural-language terms and computational model of spatial relations, a complete understanding of the relationship between the ambiguous natural-language representations and the geometric spatial relations of geographic objects is requisite. A human subjects test was conducted to find out how natural-language descriptions of spatial relations of linear objects are determined by the geometric configurations of the objects. The results indicated that both topology and metric properties influent people on choosing spatial predicates to describe spatial relations, but they have different effects on various spatial predicates. Some spatial predicates are mainly affected by topological relations, while metric measures do not have significant effects. Other spatial predicates are primarily affected by metric details, while topology only has secondary effects on them. The categories of geographic entities were found to have effects on the natural-language description in some cases.