Semantics of Line Drawings
Jocelyn Ireson-Paine
www.j-paine.org/lds/intro.html
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Introduction

In this talk, I shall look at the semantics of line drawings. What do the lines in a drawing mean? This is important if we want to make computers draw or understand drawings.

How does this relate to Workshop Thales? There has been a huge amount of work on the semantics of natural language, using formal logic, model theory, lambda calculus, high-dimensional vector spaces, category theory, statistics, and many other branches of mathematics. This has helped, and will help, with applications such as searching, speech understanding, language translation, and computational humour. But drawings are a form of language too. So what mathematical techniques can we use to attach meaning to them, and to reason about that meaning? Before we can answer this, we need to know what types of meaning they contain. That is what my talk is about.