Topological relativity is a concept of interest in geographic information theory. One way of assessing the importance of topology in spatial reasoning is to analyze commonplace terms from natural language relative to conceptual neighborhood graphs, the alignment structures of choice for topological relations. Sixteen English-language spatial prepositions for regionregion relations were analyzed...

This paper presents the current results of an ongoing research project on corpus distribution of prepositions and pronouns within Polish preposition-pronoun contractions. The goal of the project is to provide a quantitative description of Polish preposition-pronoun contractions taking into consideration morphosyntactic properties of their components. It is expected that the results will provide...

This article describes a common inventory of interpretations for postpositions (Basque) and prepositions (English and Spanish). The inventory is a flat list of tags, based mainly on thematic roles. Using the same inventory allows to know for each postposition or preposition, which are the translations for each possible interpretation. We think this resource will be useful for studies on machine...

We have developed a method to resolve ambiguities in prepositional phrase (PP) attachment in German. We measure on the one hand the cooccurrence strength between nouns (N) and prepositions (P) and on the other hand between verbs (V) and prepositions. The competing values of N+P versus V+P are used to decide whether to attach a prepositional phrase to the noun or to the verb. We calculate the co...

We present a developmental approach towards a) pre-linguistic learning of grounded spatial schemas, and b) the acquisition of spatial prepositions based on association from these pre-linguistic concepts. We learn from sentential data, picking out the words most frequently associated with the concept, and show that simple associative structures are adequate for learning object names, or distinct...

This paper presents an account of how literal and metaphoric readings of spatial prepositions in so-called “Boolean Phrases” can arise. The account aims to explain how metaphoric and literal readings can interact, when two (spatial) prepositional phrases are the arguments of one phrase headed by Boolean connectives and and or (e.g. in front of the car and over his problems). It is shown that th...