Characterizing Trajectories of Moving Objects Using Natural Language Path Descriptions

The topic of this paper1 is the analysis of the semantics of the particular spatial relations 'along' and 'past' which are used to characterize the path of moving objects. The German dialogue system CITYTOUR, which answers questions about the spatial relations of objects in a scene, is presented by means of a simple dialogue example. The representational prerequisites of the static and the dynamic objects, required for computational analysis are presented. Two concrete predicate functions testing whether a dynamic object moves along or moves past a static object are described in detail. This paper appeared in: Proc. of the 7th ECAI, volume 2, pp. 1–8, Brighton, UK, 1986. 1This report describes work done in the project VITRA, which is part of the SFB 314 Research Program of the Science Foundation (DFG) on AI and Knowledge-Based Systems.