A Formalism for Temporal Annotation and Reasoning of Complex Events in Natural Language

This work has been developed with the motivation of defining a formalism (OntoTimeFL) for annotating complex events in natural language texts and applying to the items annotated several types of axioms and rules for temporal reasoning. In part, OntoTimeFL is a conceptualization of TimeML formalism, where the basic concepts of annotation by an ontological form have been represented. In addition, OntoTimeFL introduces new constructs for the annotation that mainly concern three complex events: narrative, intentional, and causal. OntoTimeFL entities have been defined as classes of a formal ontology; a methodological choice for facilitating automatic annotation processes to reuse existing axiomatics in the research of temporal reasoning, and facilitate the creation of new ones (some proposals in this paper).