Tilburg University Proceedings of the 6 th Joint ISO-ACL SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation ( ISA-6 )

We introduce ISO-Space, an annotation specification for capturing spatial and spatiotemporal information in natural language. We discuss many of the issues found in spatial language and show how ISO-Space aims to address these problems. ISO-Space is an emerging resource that is still in its early stages of development. We describe the genres of text that will be used in a pilot annotation study, in order to refine and enrich the specification language. 1 Motivation and Problem Definition Natural languages are filled with particular constructions for talking about spatial information, including spatially anchored events, locations that are described in relation to other locations, and movement along a path. While representing and reasoning about spatial information has recently received ample attention, particularly from the qualitative reasoning community, that work often overlooks the complexity that language brings to the problem. In fact, establishing tighter formal specifications of the relationship between language and space has proved to be a considerable challenge. In this paper, we propose an annotation framework called ISO-Space that aims to be such a specification. ISO-Space incorporates the annotations of static spatial information, borrowing from the SpatialML scheme (MITRE, 2007; Mani et al., 2008), along with a new markup language called Spatiotemporal Markup Language (STML) (Pustejovsky and Moszkowicz, 2008) that focuses on locating events in space. The name “ISO-Space” is used in particular because this markup language is being developed within the ISO TC37/SC4 technical subcommittee on language resource management as part six of the Semantic Annotation Framework, where the goal is to create a new standard for capturing spatial and spatiotemporal information. In previous analyses of spatial information, it has been assumed that language makes use of a relatively simple inventory of terms in order to describe spatial information. In approaches such as these, the principal burden of explanation is located within non-linguistic formalisms, but such characterizations are ill-suited for dealing with the extreme flexibility of spatial language as used in real contexts. There are many applications and tasks which would benefit from a robust spatial markup language such as ISO-Space. These include: • Building a spatial map of objects relative to one another. • Reconstructing spatial information associated with a sequence of events. • Determining object location given a verbal description. • Translating viewer-centric verbal descriptions into other relative descriptions or absolute coordinate descriptions. • Constructing a route given a route description. • Constructing a spatial model of an interior or exterior space given a verbal description. • Integrating spatial descriptions with information from other media. To this end, the goal of ISO-Space is not to provide a formalism that fully represents the complexity of spatial language, but rather to capture these complex constructions in text to provide an inventory of how spatial information is presented in natural language. The framework is built on previous and ongoing work on annotations for spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal information, but we also follow the MATTER cycle as described in