[Ltg] LTG Seminar [Jette Viethen, 2008-09-22, E6A 202, 11am]

[Ilya Anisimoff]

LTG Seminar
 - see: http://www.clt.mq.edu.au/Events/Seminars.html

 Monday, 22nd September, 2008, 11am
 Macquarie University, E6A, Room 202
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Title: Spatial Relations in Referring Expressions
Speaker: Jette Viethen

I will be giving an overview over my work during the last year or so,
since I decided to concentrate my PhD on generating referring
expressions that contain spatial relations between objects, such as
"the tree in front of the house". The talk will have a roughly
chronological structure following the steps I took.
I will first give a short overview of what the literature on language
and space has to say about the use of spatial prepositions and of the
existing approaches in referring expression generation that can deal
with spatial relations. The second part of my talk will be about a
web-based language production experiment in which people described
simple objects in simple 3D scenes. The main aim of this experiment
was to find out in which cases people use spatial relations between
objects to describe them. I will present how the experiment was set up
and how I analysed the resulting data. In the last part of the talk I
will present my current efforts to design a second, more large-scale
production experiment. I am trying to take into account the things I
have learned from the first experiment, both about the set-up of the
experiment and about the factors that seem to influence the use of
spatial relations in referring expressions.