Reconstructing Spatial Image from Natural Language Texts 
 
 This paper describes the understanding process of the spatial descriptions in Japanese . In order to understand the described world , the authors try to reconstruct the geometric model of the global scene from the scenic descriptions drawing a space. It is done by an experimental computer program SPRINT , which takes natural language texts and produces a model of the described world . To reconstruct the model , the authors extract the qualitative spatial constraints from the text , and represent them as the numerical constraints on the spatial attributes of the entities . This makes it possible to express the vagueness of the spatial concepts and to derive the maximally plausible interpretation from a chunk of information accumulated as the constraints. The interpretation reflects the temporary belief about the world .  