Quantifying spatial prepositions

Many aspects of spatial language concerned with relationships between spatial entities are essentially vague. Current GIS technology provides very little support for dealing with this vagueness, partially because there is a lack of quantitative data and models for vague spatial relations. This paper presents an experiment that looks at quantifying spatial prepositions. In the context of image captions, the cardinal directions are analysed in an existing set of image captions, with respect to the spatial distribution of the locations of the target object (figure) and the reference object (ground). Future work will focus on using these results to improve current GIS solutions in a wide variety of scenarios