Reasoning About Fuzzy Temporal and Spatial Information from the Web

Schockaert, Steven; Cock, Martine De; Kerre, Etienne

doi:10.1142/7779

Cited by 14 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 89 publications

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“…This has some similarity with the design of RCC-12 [11]. RCC-12 relations generalize the RCC-8 relations in such a way as to allow composition rules for being expressed as (non-disjunctive) Horn rules.…”

Section: Representing Topological Background Knowledgementioning

confidence: 95%

Rewriting Queries for Web Searches That Use Local Expressions

Grütter

Helming

Speich

et al. 2011

Rule-Based Reasoning, Programming, and Applications

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Users often enter a local expression to constrain a web search to ageographical place. Current search engines' capability to deal with expressionssuch as "close to" is, however, limited. This paper presents an approach thatuses topological background knowledge to rewrite queries containing localexpressions in a format better suited to standard search engines. To formalizelocal expressions, the Region Connection Calculus (RCC) is extended byadditional relations, which are related to existing ones by means of compositionrules. The approach is applied to web searches for communities in a part ofSwitzerland which are "close to" a reference place. Results show that queryrewriting significantly improves recall of the searches. When dealing withapprox. 30,000 role assertions, the time required to rewrite queries is in therange of a few seconds. Ways of dealing with a possible decrease ofperformance when operating on a larger knowledge base are discussed. Abstract. Users often enter a local expression to constrain a web search to a geographical place. Current search engines' capability to deal with expressions such as "close to" is, however, limited. This paper presents an approach that uses topological background knowledge to rewrite queries containing local expressions in a format better suited to standard search engines. To formalize local expressions, the Region Connection Calculus (RCC) is extended by additional relations, which are related to existing ones by means of composition rules. The approach is applied to web searches for communities in a part of Switzerland which are "close to" a reference place. Results show that query rewriting significantly improves recall of the searches. When dealing with approx. 30,000 role assertions, the time required to rewrite queries is in the range of a few seconds. Ways of dealing with a possible decrease of performance when operating on a larger knowledge base are discussed.

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Section: Representing Topological Background Knowledgementioning

confidence: 95%

Rewriting Queries for Web Searches That Use Local Expressions

Grütter

Helming

Speich

et al. 2011

Rule-Based Reasoning, Programming, and Applications

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show abstract

“…Interestingly, we also found clear evidence for the oft-stated asymmetry of nearness (c.f. Schockaert, De Cock, & Kerre, 2011;Worboys, 2001), with A near B being more probable if A is less populous than B (Figure 8). Finally, our nearness maps (Figure 9) allow us to go beyond descriptive statistics and explore the spatial structure of nearness relations in individual cities, leading to new hypotheses for the interplay between geographic setting and the use of near.…”

Section: Concluding Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mining nearness relations from an n-grams Web corpus in geographical space

Derungs

Purves

2016

Spatial Cognition & Computation

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Interacting with spatial data effectively requires systems that not only process references to locations, but understand spatial natural language. Empirical research has demonstrated that near is vague, asymmetric and context dependent. We explore near in language using Microsoft Web n-grams for expressions of the form A near *, where A are placenames referring to different spatial granularities, ranging from points of interest to large U.S. cities and * are autocomplete suggestions for placenames. Analyzing the extracted expressions requires consideration of semantic and referent ambiguity. With more than 200,000 expressions we show not only what is considered to be near at different scales, but also produce intuitive maps of nearness for different locations.

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“…There are eight basic relations between regions known as RCC relations (RCC stands for "Region Connection Calculus") [25]. One may even start with a fuzzy connection relation (which might be defined from a distance or a pointwise closeness relation), and then define a "part of", or an "overlap" fuzzy relation between regions for instance, and obtain a graded extension of the RCC calculus [102]. Modal logics are also used for representing spatial information.…”

Section: Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%