creators_name: Claus, Berry creators_name: Eyferth, Klaus creators_name: Gips, Carsten creators_name: Hörnig, Robin creators_name: Schmid, Ute creators_name: Wiebrock, Sylvia creators_name: Wysotzki, Fritz editors_name: Freksa, Christian editors_name: Habel, Christopher editors_name: Wender, Karl-Friedrich type: bookchapter datestamp: 1998-07-01 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:53:59 metadata_visibility: show title: Reference Frames for Spatial Inference in Text Understanding ispublished: pub subjects: cog-psy subjects: comp-sci-art-intel subjects: comp-sci-art-intel subjects: psy-ling full_text_status: public keywords: text understanding, mental models, spatial inference, constraint satisfaction, transformation matrices abstract: We present an approach to spatial reasoning that is based on homogenous coordinate systems and their transformations. In contrast to qualitative approaches, spatial relations are not represented by symbolic expressions only but additionally by parameters with constraints, which are subsets of real numbers. Our work is based on the notion of mental models in text understanding introduced in cognitive science. That is, we model the understanding of descriptions of spatial configurations by constructing a representation of the class of situations that are compatible with the description. Within our approach a spatial relation between two objects is represented by constraining the position of one of the objects with respect to the reference frame of the other one. That is, inferences of spatial relations not given explicitly in a text depend on the frame of reference which is presumed by the (human or computer) system. In this paper we describe a general framework for spatial reasoning based on the notion of mental models and we present some empirical results concerning the influence of the selected reference frame on the inference process. date: 1998 date_type: published publication: Spatial Cognition - An interdisciplinary approach to representing and processing spatial knowledge publisher: Springer, Berlin pagerange: 241-266 refereed: FALSE citation: Claus, Berry and Eyferth, Klaus and Gips, Carsten and Hörnig, Robin and Schmid, Ute and Wiebrock, Sylvia and Wysotzki, Fritz (1998) Reference Frames for Spatial Inference in Text Understanding. [Book Chapter] document_url: http://cogprints.org/485/2/trierpapier-lv.ps