On Representing the Temporal Structure of a Natural Language Text

A proposal to deal with tenses in the framework of Discourse Representat ion Theory is presented, ms it has been implemented for a fragment a t the IMS for the project LILOG. It is based on the theory of tenses of H. K a m p and Ch. Rohrer. The system uses tile tense and aspect information, the information about the tempora l discourse s t ruc ture of tile preceding text stored in a specific list of possible reference times, and background knowledge. These types of information interact in order to choose a suited temporal anchor for the event of a new sentence. With respect to extended texts, choosing the right reference t ime for a new event is a problem which has been largely neglected in the l i terature.