Toward Blind Travel Support through Verbal Route Directions: A Path Inference Algorithm for Inferring New Route Descriptions from Existing Route Descriptions

The work presented in this article continues our investigation of such assisted navigation solutions where the main emphasis is placed not on sensor sets or sensor fusion algorithms but on the ability of the travelers to interpret and contextualize verbal route directions en route. This work contributes to our investigation of the research hypothesis that we have formulated and partially validated in our previous studies: if a route is verbally described in sufficient and appropriate amount of detail, independent VI travelers can use their O&M and problem solving skills to successfully follow the route without any wearable sensors or sensors embedded in the environment. In this investigation, we temporarily put aside the issue of how VI and blind travelers successfully interpret route directions en route and tackle the question of how those route directions can be created, generated, and maintained by online communities. In particular, we focus on the automation of path inference and present an algorithm that may be used as part of the background computation of VGI sites to find new paths in the previous route directions written by online community members, generate new route descriptions from them, and post them for subsequent community editing.