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Natural language and spatial reasoning

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-112). / Making systems that understand language has long been a dream of artificial intelligence. This thesis develops a model for understanding language about space and movement in realistic situations. The system understands language from two real-world domains: finding video clips that match a spatial language description such as "People walking through the kitchen and then going to the dining room" and following natural language commands such as "Go down the hall towards the fireplace in the living room." Understanding spatial language expressions is a challenging problem because linguistic expressions, themselves complex and ambiguous, must be connected to real-world objects and events. The system bridges the gap between language and the world by modeling the meaning of spatial language expressions hierarchically, first capturing the semantics of spatial prepositions, and then composing these meanings into higher level structures. Corpus-based evaluations of how well the system performs in different, realistic domains show that the system effectively and robustly understands spatial language expressions. / by Stefanie Anne Tellex. / Ph.D.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:MIT/oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/61937
Date January 2010
CreatorsTellex, Stefanie, 1980-
ContributorsMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.
PublisherMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Source SetsM.I.T. Theses and Dissertation
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Format112 p., application/pdf
RightsM.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission., http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

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