Nearness as context-dependent expression: an integrative review of modeling, measurement and contextual properties

ABSTRACT

Nearness expressions such as “near” are context-dependent spatial relations and are subject to the context variability effect. Depending on the provided context, “near” has a different semantic extension. We perform a literature review to identify the effect of context on “near”. To integrate the insights from different disciplines, we apply Turney’s contextualization framework which distinguishes between two types of features: primary and contextual. Primary features are the qualitative and quantitative distance measures and contextual features are the context factors used to determine a threshold on the nearness measurements. Additionally, we identify the appropriate features for different spatial tasks discussed in the literature. By doing so, we seek to build a foundation for a context-dependent model for “near”.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive modelling
• common sense and qualitative models of space
• spatial language
• uncertainty/vagueness
• nearness
• context dependency

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Maria Elena Vargas Amado for the drawing and design of the maps. We would like to thank the editor and the four reviewers for their suggestions and critical comments that helped to improve this paper.

Notes

¹ See Bazire, Bazire, Brézillon and Brézillon (2005) where 150 different definitions of context are examined without being able to provide a unified and consistent definition.

² The Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) reports from the 11 September 2001, is used as natural-language corpus.

³ google.scholar.com.

⁴ Normally we call the and the .

⁵ We assume that the findings of Ishikawa and Montello (2006) could also be formalized by semiorders.

⁶ For an overview on “nearer(x,y,z)” see Zwarts (2017).

⁷ See also Kelleher and Costello (2009), where they use Dale and Reiter (1995) generating referring expressions algorithm to select for an appropriate preposition given a visual dialog.

⁸ See also the sections and 5.4.3 for a discussion on distance in a network and direction.

⁹ For a different functional definition of “near” see Kemmerer (1999) and Bateman et al. (2010), where “near” and “far” is defined in terms of a functional contrastive opposite.

¹⁰ For a discussion on different kinds of thresholds see Denofsky (1976).

¹¹ For a discussion about different thresholds, see section 5.4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN); Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) [Project No. 200021_130151/2].