Abstract
Spatial prepositions such as in, on and near are important to describe where things are located in relation to other geographic features. Location-based services (LBS) usually disregard such spatial prepositions. Their automatic detection and interpretation is challenging, because prepositions are quite often used in non-spatial context (e.g., “in the afternoon”). This paper analyses spatial relations in short messages. Short messages typically have special characteristics (e.g., slang, abbreviations, etc.) and thus represent a special type of natural language. A sample corpus of short messages was used to extract descriptions based on spatial prepositions and to analyse their commonness of use. A frequency-based probability for each term to be spatial was calculated, which can serve as an indicator of a verbal spatial description and support the development of intelligent spatial language interpretation in automatic systems.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Linguee. From http://www.linguee.de. Accessed 12. February 2,014.
- 2.
Merriam-Webster. From http://www.merriam-webster.com. Accessed 12. February 2,014.
- 3.
WordNet (Software): http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/download/.
- 4.
All given text samples in this section are taken from the corpus in their original spelling.
References
Carlson LA, Van Deman SR (2004) The space in spatial language. J Mem Lang 51(3):418–436
Coventry KR, Garrod SC (2004) Saying, seeing and acting: the psychological semantics of spatial prepositions. Psychology Press, U K
Crooks A, Croitoru A, Stefanidis A, Radzikowski J (2013) #Earthquake: Twitter as a distributed sensor system. Trans GIS 17(1):124–147
Cunningham H (2002) GATE, a general architecture for text engineering. Comput Humanit 36(2):223–254
Finin T, Murnane W, Karandikar A, Keller N, Martineau J, Dredze M (2010) Annotating named entities in Twitter data with crowdsourcing. Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010. California Association for Computational Linguistics, Los Angeles. pp 80–88
Garrod S, Ferrier G, Campbell S (1999) In and on: investigating the functional geometry of spatial prepositions. Cognition 72:167–189
Hall M, Jones C (2008) Quantifying spatial prepositions: an experimental study. ACM GIS Irvine, CA, USA
Herskovits A (1980) On the spatial uses of Prepositions. 18th annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Holmes KJ, Wolff P (2013) When is language a window into the mind? Looking beyond words to infer conceptual categories. 35th annual conference of the cognitive science society, Austin, TX
Java A, Song X, Finin T, Tseng B (2007) Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD San Jose, California ACM. pp 56–65
Kordjamshidi P, van Otterlo M, Moens M-F, Kordjamshidi P (2010) From language towards formal spatial calculi. Proceedings of the workshop on computational models of spatial language interpretation at spatial cognition, Oregon, USA
Landau B, Jackendoff R (1993) “What” and “where” in spatial language and spatial cognition. Behav Brain Sci 16(2):217–238
Levinson SC (2004) Space in language and cognition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Retz-Schmidt G (1988) Various views on spatial prepositions. AI Magazine 9:2
Richter D, Winter S, Richter K-F, Stirling L (2013) Granularity of locations referred to by place descriptions. Comput Environ Urban Syst 41:88–99
Tenbrink T (2005) Semantics and application of spatial dimensional terms in English and German. Collaborative Research Center SFB/TR 8
Tversky B, Lee PU (1998) How space structures language. An interdisciplinary approach to representing and processing spatial knowledge. Spatial cognition. Springer, Berlin
Vasardani M, Winter S, Richter K-F, Stirling L, Richter D (2012) Spatial interpretations of preposition “at”. Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL, California ACM. pp 46–53
Zhang C, Zhang X, Jiang W, Shen Q, Zhang S (2009) Rule-based extraction of spatial relations in natural language text. Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Software Engineering (CiSE), Wuhan, China
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dittrich, A., Richter, D., Lucas, C. (2015). Analysing the Usage of Spatial Prepositions in Short Messages. In: Gartner, G., Huang, H. (eds) Progress in Location-Based Services 2014. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11879-6_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11879-6_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-11878-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-11879-6
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)