Incorporation of Natural Language Processing and a Generative System - an Interactive System that Constructs Topological Models from Spatial Descriptions in Natural Language

The natural language processing technique and the spatial reasoning technique are incorporated to create a computational model representing the process of updating and maintaining the knowledge about spatial relations. An algorithm for the spatial reasoning is proposed. An interactive system that understands sentences describing spatial relations is implemented. The system determines the reference of an anaphoric or deictic expression from the literal meaning of the input and the implicit meaning derived from the literal meaning. The consistency of the spatial relations is maintained. The correct topological representations of the spatial relations are generated from well-formed descriptions