Abstract. Route directions are usually conveyed either by graphical means, i.e. by illustrating the route in a map or drawing a sketch-maps or, linguistically by giving spoken or written route instructions, or by combining both kinds of external representations. In most cases route directions are given in advance, i.e. prior to the actual traveling. But they may also be communicated quasisimultaneously to the movement along the route, for example, in the case of incar navigation systems. We dub this latter kind accompanying route directions. Accompanying route direction may be communicated in a dialogue, i.e. with hearer feedback, or, in a monologue, i.e. without hearer feedback. In this article we focus on accompanying route directions without hearer feedback. We start with theoretical considerations from spatial cognition research about the interaction between internal and external representations interconnecting linguistic aspects of verbal route directions with findings from cognitive psychology on route knowledge. In particular we are interested in whether speakers merge elementary route segments into higher order chunks in accompanying route directions. This process, which we identify as spatial chunking, is subsequently investigated in a case study. We have speakers produce accompanying route directions without hearer feedback on the basis of a route that is presented in a spatially veridical map. We vary presentation mode of the route: In the static mode the route in presented as a discrete line, in the dynamic mode, it is presented as a moving dot. Similarities across presentation modes suggest overall organization principles for route directions, which are both independent of the type of route direction-in advance versus accompanying-and of presentation mode-static versus dynamic. We conclude that spatial chunking is a robust and efficient conceptual process that is partly independent of preplanning.
We present a semantic tagging system for temporal expressions and discuss how the temporal information conveyed by these expressions can be extracted. The performance of the system was evaluated wrt. a small hand-annotated corpus of news messages.
The interpretation of plural anaphora often requires the construction of complex reference objects (RefOs) out of RefOs which were formerly introduced not by plural terms but by a number of singular terms only. Often, several complex RefOs can be constructed, but only one of them is the preferred referent for the plural anaphor in question. As a means of explanation for preferred and non-preferred interpretations of plural anaphora, the concept of a Common Association Basis (CAB) for the potential atomic parts of a complex object is introduced in the following. CABs pose conceptual constraints on the formation of complex RefOs in general. We argue that in cases where a suitable CAB for the atomic RefOs introduced in the text exists, the corresponding complex RefO is constructed as early as in the course of processing the antecedent sentence and put into the focus domain of the discourse model. Thus, the search for a referent for a plural anaphor is constrained to a limited domain of RefOs according to the general principles of focus theory in NLP. Further principles of interpretation are suggested which guide the resolution of plural anaphora in cases where more than one suitable complex RefO is in focus.* The research on this paper was supported in part by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under grant Ha 1237/2-1. GAP is the acronym for "Gruppierungs-und Abgrenzungsgrozesse beim Aufbau sprachlich angeregter mentaler Modelle" (Processes of grouping and separation in the construction of mental models from texts), a research project carried out in the DFG-program "Kognitive Linguistik".
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