Exploration of functional semantics of prepositions from corpora of descriptions of visual scenes

Abstract

We present a method of extracting functional semantic knowledge from corpora of descriptions of visual scenes. Such knowledge is required for interpretation and generation of spatial descriptions in tasks such as visual search. We identify semantic classes of target and landmark objects related by each preposition by abstracting over WordNet taxonomy. The inclusion of such knowledge in visual search should equip robots with a better, more human-like spatial cognition.