Identification of the initial entity in granular route directions

Abstract

Current navigation services assume wayfinders new to an environment. In contrast, our focus is on route directions for wayfinders who are familiar with the environment, such as taxi drivers and couriers. We observe that people communicate route directions to these wayfinders in a hierarchical and granular manner, assuming some shared knowledge of the environment. These route directions do not focus on the route but rather on the destination. In this paper we solve the first problem of automatically generating route directions in a hierarchical and granular manner: finding the initial entity of such a communication. We propose a formal model to determine the initial entity, based on Grice's c..