General Conclusion - Geographical Information Retrieval in Textual Corpora - page 101

of the first arguments. There is indeed a reinforcement of the relevance of this
sentence for the query because a thematic argument and a spatial argument are
directly associated via n-ary relation no. 2.
Figure4.9presents,insimplifiedway,theresultoftheanalysisofthissentenceby
the ALPAGE 4 analyzer, which shows well the explicit relation between “from where
a txistu tune was coming” and “inn of Platane”.
Figure 4.9. Simplified output of the ALPAGE analyzer
We issue the hypothesis that spatial, temporal and thematic information
associated via a no. 2 n-ary relation (reinforcement of an argument relative to the
action by another argument) or a no.3 n-ary relation (association of several
arguments via the action they qualify, respectively) reinforce the relevance of the
sentence in the framework of the corresponding search.
However, cases 1 (“He left for Pagolle playing a txistu tune”) and 4 (“He left
Pagolle, walked long hours and finished his itinerary by playing a txistu tune”) can
imply spatial, temporal or thematic information whose direct relations are not
systematic. There is, therefore, no reinforcement to implement here. Finally, different
forms of negation should contribute to a downgrading of the document in the set of
results or even its pure and simple disqualification.
Numerous approaches are now interested in the semantics of relations. The
SemEval 5 campaigns propose, for example, a task called “(8) Multi-Way
Classification of Semantic Relations Between Pairs of Nominals”, which targets the
analysis of relations between two nominal groups in the same sentence. The work of
the T2I team of the laboratory of LIUPPA relative to the study of motion or
perception verbs [NGU 11] will also be able to contribute to a more accurate analysis
of the relations between pieces of spatial information or between pieces of spatial,
temporal and thematic information, within the same sentence.
4 http://alpage.inria.fr/alpes/parser.pl.
5 http://www.senseval.org/.