  We present a novel heuristic approach that defines fuzzy geographical
descriptors using data gathered from a survey with human subjects. The
participants were asked to provide graphical interpretations of the descriptors
`north' and `south' for the Galician region (Spain). Based on these
interpretations, our approach builds fuzzy descriptors that are able to compute
membership degrees for geographical locations. We evaluated our approach in
terms of efficiency and precision. The fuzzy descriptors are meant to be used
as the cornerstones of a geographical referring expression generation algorithm
that is able to linguistically characterize geographical locations and regions.
This work is also part of a general research effort that intends to establish a
methodology which reunites the empirical studies traditionally practiced in
data-to-text and the use of fuzzy sets to model imprecision and vagueness in
words and expressions for text generation purposes.

Artificial Intelligence