Spatiotemporal extensions to a controlled natural language

Abstract

We discuss extensions to the controlled natural language CPL to explicitly define and reason about temporal and spatial concepts. New sentence templates are added to define culturally-specific temporal and spatial names. Two kinds of queries are supported: (1) proximity queries, and (2) relational (e.g., overlap or containment) queries. Proximity queries require concepts grounded in terms of absolute time (UTC times) or location (latitude and longitude). Relational queries can be answered using Allen's Interval Algebra, for time; or Region Connection Calculus (RCC-8), for regions. Our motivation for handling proximity queries is to allow easy feature definition for a machine learning algorithm that detects anomalous vehicle travel. Our motivation for addressing more general, relational queries is to improve CPL's modeling of the temporal and spatial relationships of events and objects that occur in sentences, in order to further improve its semantic reasoning capabilities in applications such as Q&A. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.