Inducing Temporal Graphs

We consider the problem of constructing a directed acyclic graph that encodes temporal relations found in a text. The unit of our analysis is a temporal segment, a fragment of text that maintains temporal coherence. The strength of our approach lies in its ability to simultaneously optimize pairwise ordering preferences and global constraints on the graph topology. Our learning method achieves 83% F-measure in temporal segmentation and 84% accuracy in inferring temporal relations between two segments.