Where the Cat Sat: A Multilingual Framework for Spatial Language Understanding

AbstractSpatial 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.