Interpreting natural language descriptions of the topological relations of enclaves

Xiaonan Wang and Xiuyuan Zhang ()
Additional contact information
Xiaonan Wang: The University of Melbourne
Xiuyuan Zhang: Peking University

Journal of Geographical Systems, 2025, vol. 27, issue 2, No 7, 335 pages

Abstract: Abstract An enclave is a part of country that is surrounded by another country, or any small, distinct area or group enclosed or isolated within a larger one. Enclaves' spatial configurations often influence local cultures, national politics, and even international relationship, but they are much more complicated to measure and express compared to non-enclaves, for example, natural language expressions used to describe enclaves' spatial relations can include the mutually exclusive terms, e.g., "inside" and "surrounded by". To better understand natural language expressions of enclaves, this research investigates whether preferences exist for various spatial relation terms and assess the factors that may influence the choice of different expressions used to describe enclaves' spatial configurations. Using human subject testing, we quantitatively evaluated 18 spatial configurations, four categories, and rotation and shape changes applied to enclave representations, and asked subjects to select from among five spatial relation choices and five predefined reasons for their choices. The survey results from 126 participants provided the basis to construct a random forest model for predicting enclave spatial relation choices, given different spatial configurations and contexts, which has an acceptable prediction accuracy of 77.04% and indicates Reasons that play a more important role (76% importance) in predicting the choice compared to classical spatial configuration measurements. It demonstrates the natural language descriptions that usually differ from the formal topological models. These results facilitate consistent interpretation of natural language used to describe enclaves, and support further studies on employing Reasons as an influential factor for natural language spatial queries.

Keywords: Enclaves; Topological relations; Natural language descriptions; Incompatible expressions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Y91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10109-025-00461-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jgeosy:v:27:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s10109-025-00461-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10109/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10109-025-00461-8

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Geographical Systems is currently edited by Manfred M. Fischer and Antonio Páez

More articles in Journal of Geographical Systems from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().