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.
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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.
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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
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11879-6_11
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