Sentence planning for realtime navigational instructions

Abstract

In the current work, we focus on systems that provide incremental directions and monitor the progress of mobile users following those directions. Such directions are based on dynamic quantities like the visibility of reference points and their distance from the user. An intelligent navigation assistant might take advantage of the user's mobility within the setting to achieve communicative goals, for example, by repositioning him to a point from which a description of the target is easier to produce. Calculating spatial variables over a corpus of human-human data developed for this study, we trained a classifier to detect contexts in which a target object can be felicitously described. Our algorithm matched the human subjects with 86% precision.