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Description:
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Interpreting Motion presents an integrated perspective on how language
structures constrain concepts of motion and how the world shapes the way
motion is linguistically expressed. Natural language allows for efficient
communication of elaborate descriptions of movement without requiring a
precise specification of the motion. Interpreting Motion is the first book to
analyze the semantics of motion expressions in terms of the formalisms of
qualitative spatial reasoning. It shows how motion descriptions in language
are mapped to trajectories of moving entities based on qualitative spatio-
temporal relationships. The authors provide an extensive discussion of prior
research on spatial prepositions and motion verbs, devoting chapters to the
compositional semantics of motion sentences, the formal representations
needed for computers to reason qualitatively about time, space, and motion,
and the methodology for annotating corpora with linguistic information in order
to train computer programs to reproduce the annotation. The applications they
illustrate include route navigation, the mapping of travel narratives, question-
answering, image and video tagging, and graphical rendering of scenes from
textual descriptions.
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