Reconstructing spatial image from natural language texts

This paper describes the understanding process of the spatial descriptions in Japanese. In order to understand the described world, the authors try to reconstruct the geometric model of the global scene from the scenic descriptions drawing a space. It is done by an experimental computer program SPRINT, which takes natural language texts and produces a model of the described world. To reconstruct the model, the authors extract the qualitative spatial constraints from the text, and represent them as the numerical constraints on the spatial attributes of the eutities. This makes it possible to express the vagueness of the spatial concepts and to derive the maximally plausible interpretation from a chunk of information accumulated as the constraints. The interpretation reflects the temporary belief about the world.