L'ESPACE EN FRANCAIS Claude Vandeloise Editions du Seuil 27, rue Jacob, Paris VI Paris, France October, 1986. 245 pages, Cost 120 FF Reviewed by: Paul Creelman Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics and Comp. Science Dalhouse University Halifax, Nova Scotia This simple yet engaging book examines the meaning of the words used to describe space and spatial relations. The words examined in this w o r k in linguistics and c o g nitive science include the prepositions a b o v e / b e l o w , i n s i d e / o u t s i d e , in front/behind, before/after, to the r i g h t / t o the left, and others. This book will be of greatest interest to those working on the k n o w l e d g e representation and semantics of spatial relations as part of a natural language processing (NLP) project. Applications m i g h t include parts of the NLP interface to a scene analysis system or NLP i n terface to an expert system advice on, for example, airplane repair where the airplane parts are in various spatial relations to one another and to the person using the system. Thus workers in NLP interfacing of various types may be interested. A good French/English dictionary may be needed to read Vandeloise although the language used is not difficult. A l m o s t all of the issues and points e x amined by Vandeloise are directly applicable to English language semantics as well. Why does one say "The stone is before the house" but not "The house is after the stone"? This is the t y p e of issue examined by the author. Vandeloise examines the semantics of spatial relations by looking at both g e o m e t r i c and logical descriptions of spatial relations. He concludes that both g e o m e t r y and logic are insufficient to express the meaning of spatial relations in natural language. Instead, he turns to a cognitive functional description involving knowledge of the world in order to describe the meaning of spatial propositions. Many of his descriptions involve t w o objects being related in space, called the site and the target. These may be described in terms of intrinsic or contextual orientation. Thus they may have a general o r i e n t a t i o n made up of a frontal direction, a line of sight and a direction of m o v e ment. (Referring to animate beings. Inanimate objects may also have an orientation but not a line of sight.) The orientation of the site and object helps d e t e r m i n e the phrase used to describe the spatial relation. For each preposition studied by Vandeloise, he presents primary and alternative rules for representing the meaning of the s p a tial relation represented. In some cases the rules are f o r mal or mathematical (for example, the schema shown for representing "in" ("dans") with all possible meanings is given on page 220 in set theoretical terms). In all cases an analysis is made of alternative meanings and various context sensitive restrictions on use of the propositions studied. d e t e r m i n i n g factors in saying that the site is before or after the target. These different possible meanings are unified by the concept of a "pole" on an order scale. The primary meaning of "before," for example, is given on page 163 as meaning that the target is closer to the pole than the site is. Similar analyses are performed for o t h e r prepositions used to describe spatial relations. All in all, this b o o k is a valuable source of ideas for NLP projects involving spatial relations. One of the m o r e interesting spatial propositions e x amined is "before"/"after". Vandeloise looks at the use of "before"/"after" and the necessry underlying concept of o r der. Not only does direction of m o v e m e n t and line of sight affect the use of " b e f o r e ' / " after," but in many everyday usages time, arbitrary order scales such as paths in space, or abstract orders (i.e. alphabetical) are the SIGART Newsletter, April 1988, Number 104 Page 17

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