Representing and Reasoning with Functional Knowledge for Spatial Language Understanding

Abstract : One of the central problems in spatial language understanding is the polysemy and the vagueness of spatial terms, which cannot be resolved by lexical knowledge alone. We address this issue by developing a representation framework for functional interactions between objects and agents. We use this framework with a constraint solver to resolve and recover the meanings of spatial descriptions for object placement tasks. We describe our approach in a virtual environment with an example of object placement task.