Where Do We Go From Here? Multi-scale Allocentric Relational Inferencefrom Natural Spatial Descriptions

Anonymous

Abstract:

The concept of {\em acquired spatial knowledge} is crucial in spatial cognitive research, particularly when it comes to communicating routes. However, NLP navigation studies often overlook the impact of acquired knowledge on textual descriptions. Current navigation studies concentrate on egocentric local descriptions (e.g., `it will be on your right') that require reasoning over the agent's local perception. These instructions are typically given in a sequence of steps, with each action-step explicitly mentioned and followed by a landmark that the agent can use to verify that they are on the correct path (e.g., `turn right and then you will see...').
In contrast, descriptions based on knowledge acquired through a map provide a complete view of the environment and capture its compositionality. These instructions typically contain allocentric relations, are non-sequential, with implicit actions and multiple spatial relations without any verification (e.g., `south of Central Park and a block north of a police station'). This paper introduces the Rendezvous (RVS) task and dataset, which includes 10,404 examples of English geospatial instructions for reaching a target location using map-knowledge. Our analysis reveals that RVS exhibits a richer use of spatial allocentric relations, and requires resolving more spatial relations simultaneously compared to previous text-based navigation benchmarks.

Paper Type: long

Research Area: Resources and Evaluation

Contribution Types: Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Data resources, Data analysis

Languages Studied: English

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