A Computational Model for Reference Object Selection in Spatial Relations

摘要

Automatic generation of adequate spatial relations with regard to reference object selection is a nontrivial problem. In the present paper, we develop, implement and evaluate a computational model for reference object selection using empirically derived conceptual spatial strategies. The attribution of roles (reference object and located object) in object configurations was investigated to derive conceptual spatial strategies with regard to size and position of the objects. These strategies were implemented in a computational model to generate spatial descriptions of furniture configurations. To evaluate the automatically generated descriptions, we contrasted them with analog sentences with inverted roles of reference and located object and asked participants to choose the more adequate description out of the two. The spatial descriptions automatically generated were chosen significantly more often. This indicates that taking spatial conceptual strategies into account improves the adequacy of automatically generated spatial descriptions.