Generation of landmark-based navigation instructions from open-source data

Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 757–766, Avignon, France, April 23 - 27 2012. c⃝2012 Association for Computational Linguistics Generation of landmark-based navigation instructions from open-source data Markus Dr¨ager Dept. of Computational Linguistics Saarland University mdraeger@coli.uni-saarland.de Alexander Koller Dept. of Linguistics University of Potsdam koller@ling.uni-potsdam.de Abstract We present a system for the real-time gen- eration of car navigation instructions with landmarks. Our system relies exclusively on freely available map data from Open- StreetMap, organizes its output to fit into the available time until the next driving ma- neuver, and reacts in real time to driving er- rors. We show that female users spend sig- nificantly less time looking away from the road when using our system compared to a baseline system. 1 Introduction Systems that generate route instructions are be- coming an increasingly interesting application area for natural language generation (NLG) sys- tems. Car navigation systems are ubiquitous already, and with the increased availability of powerful mobile devices, the wide-spread use of pedestrian navigation systems is on the horizon. One area in which NLG systems could improve existing navigation systems is in the use of land- marks, which would enable them to generate in- structions such as “turn right after the church” in- stead of “after 300 meters”. It has been shown in human-human studies that landmark-based route instructions are easier to understand (Lovelace et al., 1999) than distance-based ones and re- duce driver distraction in in-car settings (Bur- nett, 2000), which is crucial for improved traffic safety (Stutts et al., 2001). From an NLG per- spective, navigation systems are an obvious ap- plication area for situated generation, for which there has recently been increasing interest (see e.g. (Lessmann et al., 2006; Koller et al., 2010; Striegnitz and Majda, 2009)). Current commercial navigation systems use only trivial NLG technology, and in particular are limited to distance-based route instructions. Even in academic research, there has been remarkably little work on NLG for landmark-based naviga- tion systems. Some of these systems rely on map resources that have been hand-crafted for a par- ticular city (Malaka et al., 2004), or on a com- bination of multiple complex resources (Raubal and Winter, 2002), which effectively limits their coverage. Others, such as Dale et al. (2003), fo- cus on non-interactive one-shot instruction dis- courses. However, commercially successful car navigation systems continuously monitor whether the driver is following the instructions and pro- vide modified instructions in real time when nec- essary. That is, two key problems in designing NLG systems for car navigation instructions are the availability of suitable map resources and the ability of the NLG system to generate instructions and react to driving errors in real time. In this paper, we explore solutions to both of these points. We present the Virtual Co-Pilot, a system which generates route instructions for car navigation using landmarks that are extracted from the open-source OpenStreetMap resource.1 The system computes a route plan and splits it into episodes that …

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