Language and Space: A Two-level Semantic Approach based on Principles of Ontological Engineering

The situated interpretation of natural language concerning space, spatial relationships and spatial activities is a complex problem spanning contributions from several disciplines. Space plays a central role in many theories of cognition and the spatial language observed in actual contexts of use is extremely flexible. In this talk, I present a two-level semantic-based approach to the interpretation of spatial language, showing how it is beneficial to distinguish a shallow semantics motivated primarily from grammatical evidence from a contextualised semantics that expresses situated spatial interpretations. I show on the basis of examples just why this is necessary and how adopting modern principles of ontological engineering can help Several potential applications will also be suggested drawing on our ongoing work on natural language generation and analysts in dialogic contexts. The general conclusion that the talk will motivate is that it is beneficial to cleanly separate the linguistic semantics of space from the non-linguistic, situation-specific interpretation of space It is interesting, therefore, to consider the extent to which this may also be true of other domains