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<Paper uid="P94-1042">
  <Title>A COMPUTATIONAL VIEW OF THE COGNITIVE SEMANTICS OF SPATIAL PREPOSITIONS*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> An increased interest in ttle semantics of spatial language has accompanied the recent rise in popularity of cognitive linguistics (see \[Rudzka-Ostyn1988\]), yet computational approaches are thin on the ground. This can in part be accounted for by the rather descriptive and unformalized nature of the theories developed, but is more likely due to the adoption of an ideational view of linguistic meaning which, it seems, is an anathema to computational linguists. In this paper we take a serious, if informal, look at Ronald Langacker's theory of Cognitive Grammar \[Langacker1987\], \[Langacker1988a\], \[Langacker1988b\], more specifically its commitment to conceptualization and the use of conventional imagery.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The first section of this paper introduces the semantics of projective prepositions (eg. &amp;quot;in front of&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;behind&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;left of&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;right of&amp;quot;), illustrating that these seemingly simple predicates are suprisingly complex and ambiguous. In the light of this discovery the following sections consider Langacker's view of linguistic meaning, and the design of a conceptual representation for spatial prepositions motivated by the consideration of the various *Thi~ research wa~ kindly funded by the Mat- null Internet: tsujii~ccl.umist.ac.uk dimensions of conventional imagery. The representation has been implemented for English spatial descriptions and after demonstrating its utility for the automatic depiction of verbal descriptions, we finally contrast our approach against previous at tenapts.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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