Alpine Space Projects

Swiss landscape is unthinkable without mountains, just as a weekend is unthinkable without going to the mountains for many living in Switzerland. The weekend over, platforms such as www.hikr.org are bombarded with reports and new route directions – a wealth of data – to the utter joy of geographers.

Switzerland’s hallucinatory landscapes demand immediate action – grab boots, leap on board, toot bike bell and let spirits rip. [1] — Nicola Williams

The GISLab, through Katja Egorova’s PhD, is currently working on three related projects investigating how such texts can be used to better understand (alpine) spatial cognition.

Fictive Motion: Extraction and Classification

Fictive motion can encode general knowledge (“The range goes along the coast”), vista description (“Far below, the glacier curved to the east”) or the motion of the observer (“The ridge went on for another 3 hours”). In this joint project with L. Moncla & C. Claramunt (Naval Academy Research Institute, France) and M. Gaio (University of Pau, France), we develop rules for the automatic classification of fictive motion into these three types. This enhances methods for capturing rich spatial information in text, but also reveals the fundamentally different spatial thinking strategies involved into the conceptualization of these types of scenes. The results of the project will be reported in a publication planned for 2017.

Corpus-based Investigation of Landscape Terms’ Semantics

This project adopts a distributional semantics approach to compare the similarity of linguistic contexts of landscape terms, thus giving an insight into the underlying similarity of concepts. An explorative study based on the “Text and Mountain” corpus (digitized, pre-processed and made available by the Institute of Computational Linguistics, UZH), limited to adjectives as contexts, produced some interesting findings calling for further investigation (e.g., similarity of contexts of glacier and valley; possibility of grouping contexts into coherent types of properties). In the next steps, we will expand our definition of contexts as well as conduct a comparative study with a more general corpus. We are very happy to cooperate if you have an interest in distributional semantics!

Mountain Scenario in Alpine Route Directions

Providers of online route directions cannot adjust to the knowledge of a recipient and have to assume some shared knowledge of alpine space among mountaineering readers. This offers an opportunity to investigate the existence of elements typically associated with alpine space through the prism of the new and given information. Some of the preliminary findings suggest that an entity can be introduced as given because it can be inferred from other entities, thus signaling the mountains scenario (e.g., mountains have peaks, ridges have crests, couloirs have bottoms); but also because it will be uniquely identifiable the moment a recipient finds him or herself at the described location in the future, which calls for the adjustment of the original taxonomy [2] to the specifics of discourse. We aim to examine these issues more closely and would be delighted to discuss this research with anyone interested.

[1] http://www.lonelyplanet.com/switzerland/introduction

[2] Prince, E. F. (1981) Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. Radical pragmatics.