Carsim: A System to Convert Written Accident Reports into Animated 3D Scenes
Richard Johansson, Pierre Nugues, David M. Williams · 2004
Abstract. This paper describes a system to create animated 3D scenes of car accidents from reports written in Swedish. The system has been developed using news reports of varying size and complexity. The text-to-scene conversion process consists of two stages. An information extraction module creates a tabular description of the accident and a visual simulator generates and animates the scene. We first describe the overall structure of the text-to-scene conversion and the template structure. We then explain the information extraction and visualization modules. We show snapshots of the car animation output and we conclude with the results we obtained. 1 Text-to-Scene Conversion Images and graphics have an indisputable capacity to represent and to communicate knowledge, see [1], [2], and [3]. As it has been frequently noted, it is often easier to explain physical phenomena, mathematic theorems, or structures of any kind using a drawing than words. Images can help understand ideas or situations and realize their