Identifying and inferring objects from textual descriptions of scenes from books

Fiction authors rarely provide detailed descriptions of scenes, preferring the reader to fill in the details using their imagination. Therefore, to perform detailed text-to-scene conversion from books, we need to not only identify explicit objects but also infer implicit objects. In this paper, we describe an approach to inferring objects using Wikipedia and WordNet. In our experiments, we are able to infer implicit objects such as monitor and computer by identifying explicit objects such as keyboard. 1998 ACM Subject Classification I.2.10 Vision and Scene Understanding, I.2.6 Learning, I.2.7 Natural Language Processing