Building a Corpus of Spatial Relational Expressions Extracted from Web Documents

Abstract

Spatial language, despite decades of research, still poses substantial challenges for automated systems, for instance in geographic information retrieval or human-robot interaction. We describe an approach to building a corpus of natural language expressions extracted from web documents for analyzing and modeling spatial relational expressions (SRE). The unique characteristic of this corpus is that it is built around georeferenced triplets, with each triplet containing two entities (including their latitude/longitude coordinates) related by a spatial expression such as near. While the approach is still experimental, our first results are promising, in that we believe they will form the found..