@inproceedings{inostroza-etal-2026-cat,
title = "Where the Cat Sat: A Multilingual Framework for Spatial Language Understanding",
author = "Inostroza, Demian and
Vylomova, Ekaterina and
Kemp, Charles and
Carroll, Mae and
Li, Wanchun and
Mistica, Meladel",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1633/",
pages = "35344--35362",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Spatial language understanding is fundamental to tasks from robot navigation to document analysis, yet current work exhibits biases toward English and prepositional marking. We present a multilingual framework and benchmark decomposing spatial relations into surface elements (figure, ground, predicate, markers) and semantic components (dynamicity, stasis). Evaluating frontier LLMs on Spanish, Basque, and Chinese with text-only input, we find high accuracy on figure and ground identification but persistent gaps in two areas: semantic classification of topological and projective relations, and surface identification of morphological spatial markers{---}Basque case affixes proving most challenging at as low as 15.3{\%}. These results suggest that surface parsing does not entail spatial understanding, and that evaluation must include typologically diverse spatial marking strategies."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Where the Cat Sat: A Multilingual Framework for Spatial Language Understanding
%A Inostroza, Demian
%A Vylomova, Ekaterina
%A Kemp, Charles
%A Carroll, Mae
%A Li, Wanchun
%A Mistica, Meladel
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F inostroza-etal-2026-cat
%X Spatial language understanding is fundamental to tasks from robot navigation to document analysis, yet current work exhibits biases toward English and prepositional marking. We present a multilingual framework and benchmark decomposing spatial relations into surface elements (figure, ground, predicate, markers) and semantic components (dynamicity, stasis). Evaluating frontier LLMs on Spanish, Basque, and Chinese with text-only input, we find high accuracy on figure and ground identification but persistent gaps in two areas: semantic classification of topological and projective relations, and surface identification of morphological spatial markers—Basque case affixes proving most challenging at as low as 15.3%. These results suggest that surface parsing does not entail spatial understanding, and that evaluation must include typologically diverse spatial marking strategies.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1633/
%P 35344-35362
Markdown (Informal)
[Where the Cat Sat: A Multilingual Framework for Spatial Language Understanding](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1633/) (Inostroza et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Demian Inostroza, Ekaterina Vylomova, Charles Kemp, Mae Carroll, Wanchun Li, and Meladel Mistica. 2026. Where the Cat Sat: A Multilingual Framework for Spatial Language Understanding. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 35344–35362, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.