The study of spatial relations has been an important research topic in a number of different domains. As a result several relation-based systems have been developed to represent and process spatial relations. This paper identifies the concepts underlying the representation of spatial relations and outlines the processes involved in relation-based information processing. In the paper we also dis...

Existing models of spatial relations do not consider that different concepts exist on different levels in a hierarchy and in turn that the spatial relations in a given scene are a function of the specific concepts considered. One approach to determining the existence of a particular spatial relation is to compute the corresponding high level concepts explicitly using map generalization before i...

Studies in semantics traditionally focus on knowledge of objects. By contrast, less is known about how objects relate to each other. In an fMRI study, we tested the hypothesis that the neural processing of categorical spatial relations between objects is distinct from the processing of the identity of objects. Attending to the categorical spatial relations compared with attending to the identit...

We consider the problem of robots following natural language commands through previously unknown outdoor environments. A robot receives commands in natural language, such as “Navigate around the building to the car left of the fire hydrant and near the tree.” The robot needs first to classify its surrounding objects into categories, using images obtained from its sensors. The result of this cla...

†Centre for Research in Geomatics (CRG), Laval University, Quebec (QC) Canada – [email protected] ‡Industrial Research Chair in Geospatial Databases for Decision Support, Laval University, Quebec (QC), Canada – [email protected] §Cemagref-Clermont-Ferrand, France – [email protected] ††Dept. Computer Sciences, Blaise-Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand, France – michel.s...

The ability to reason about relations is relevant for many spatial cognitive processes. This can involve: (i) to represent spatial information mentally, (ii) to manipulate the spatial representation, and (iii) to infer new spatial information. Several cognitive theories make assumptions and predictions about the underlying processes. A detailed and systematic overview and analysis of ireliable ...

People often carry out tasks that entail coordinating spatial information encoded in temporally and/or spatially distinct perceptual experiences. Much research has been conducted to determine whether such spatial information is integrated into a single spatial representation or whether it is kept in separate representations that can be related at the time of retrieval. Here, we review the exist...

This paper focuses on the automated extraction of concrete entities from a specialized-domain corpus. Then, in a bootstrapping phase, the candidates are used to extract new candidates. Concrete entities are automatically identified by a set of spatial features. In a spatial scene something is located by virtue of the spatial properties associated with a reference object. The axial properties ar...

The interplay between visual perception and natural language in humanmachine-interaction receives growing attention since it constitutes a prominent issue in many potential application areas. The aim of language-oriented AI research in this context is to achieve an operational form of referential semantics that reaches down to the sensoric level. In this contribution, we will focus on the evalu...

We present an approach to the problem of learning by observation in spatially-situated tasks, whereby an agent learns to imitate the behaviour of an observed expert with no interaction and limited observations. The form of knowledge representation used for these observations is crucial, and we apply Qualitative Spatial-Relational representations to compress continuous, metric state-spaces into ...