[Ltg] SALS-SIG Seminar - 2nd April 2004 - Stephan Winter

[Stephen.Wan at csiro.au]

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SALS-SIG Seminar
 - see: http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/SALS-SIG.html

Friday, 2nd April 2004, at 11am
Macquarie Uni, E6A 202
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*** PLEASE NOTE THE UNUSUAL DATE AND LOCATION ***

Speaker: Stephan Winter
Title: Landmark extraction and communication in wayfinding directions

Abstract:
I propose a model of measuring the salience of a specific class of spatial
features: façades of buildings. The locally most salient features are considered as landmarks, or as the features people refer to when giving wayfinding directions. This model will be adapted to abilities and preferences of user groups of wayfinding services. I will prove the hypothesis that focalization can be sufficiently modelled by weights of salience measures. The long term goal is to identify sets of weights for typical foci of user groups. In a second part of the talk, I will report on our first findings to investigate the understanding of landmarks in narratives, considering wayfinding directions as narratives. We demonstrate how the initial experience - the landmark - is incorporated into communication structures, how it turns into a narrative in order to secure understanding and how understanding is guided via narrative structures. Our final interest is in computer generated route directions, as provided by navigation services. We will show that simply referring to landmarks in route directions is not sufficient for successful communication.

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   Stephen Wan                                        
     PhD Student                                      
     Language Technology Group                        
     Macquarie University                             
                                                      
     Snail-mail Address:                              
     c/o CSIRO    
     Locked Bag 17, North Ryde NSW 1670, Australia    
                                                      
   Phone: (+61 2) 9325 3142                           
   fax  : (+61 2) 9325 3200                           
   Email: Stephen.Wan@csiro.au
          swan@ics.mq.edu.au                       
   Web: http://www.cmis.csiro.au/Stephen.Wan          
        http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~swan                
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