ABSTRACT
Spatial language incorporates descriptions of locations, routes, and landscapes, and is used by humans daily. Research has addressed a wide range of aspects of spatial language, including its form; the ways in which it is selected and applied; and cognitive, geometric, and functional factors affecting its use. Furthermore, much work has been done on the automation of spatial language extraction, analysis, interpretation, and generation. To introduce the Special Issue on this broad topic, this paper reviews spatial language research framed by an extension to the well-known semantic triangle, the “spatial semantic pyramid,” which represents both human spatial language and relevant computational research. By introducing it, we hope to stimulate discussion about gaps and future directions in this important research field.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 It should be noted that while spatial language includes the description of entity properties such as shape, form and size, these are not addressed in detail in this review.
2 For presentation reasons, we reorient the pyramid relative to Ogden and Richards (Citation1923), to position the spatial world (equivalent to the referent in their terminology) at the top of the pyramid.
3 Reference frames have also been classified as egocentric and allocentric, among other schemes; Levinson (Citation2003) described how these different classifications relate to each other, precluding a direct “translation” of terminologies.
4 The embedding of a word is a multidimensional vector, intended to represent its meaning, based on a dimensionality reduction procedure applied to words that represent the context of the word, derived for example from data co-occurrence statistics.
5 We use the term formally-specified ontologies to refer to the kind of ontologies described in the computer science discipline as a formal specification of a shared conceptualization (Gruber, Citation1995), in contrast to the more general use of the word ontology as a study of the nature of being.
8 An allocentric FoR is centered on objects other than the observer (in contrast to egocentric), while the distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic FoR refers to whether the FoR orientation is determined by intrinsic features of the reference object or person (as opposed to by an external perspective or other external factors, such a cardinal directions or direction of flow of a river).