We introduce an annotation scheme for temporal expressions, and describe a method for resolving temporal expressions in print and broadcast news. The system, which is based on both hand-crafted and machine-learnt rules, achieves an 83.2% accuracy (Fmeasure) against hand-annotated data. Some initial steps towards tagging event chronologies are also described.

Work on the interpretation of temporal expressions in text has generally been pursued in one of two paradigms: the formal semantics approach, where an attempt is made to provide a well-grounded theoretical basis for the interpretation of these expressions, and the more pragmaticallyfocused approach represented by the development of the TIMEX2 standard, with its origins in work in information ex...

This paper presents a demonstration of a temporal reasoning system that addresses three fundamental tasks related to temporal expressions in text: extraction, normalization to time intervals and comparison. Our system makes use of an existing state-of-the-art temporal extraction system, on top of which we add several important novel contributions. In addition, we demonstrate that our system can...

Demonstrative terms are highly contextdependent elements both in deictic and anaphoric uses. When reference is transferred from a visual, threedimensional context to the textual domain, information-structure factors (i.e. the cognitive status of the antecedent, recency of mention, syntactic structure or the semantic type of the antecedent) have an effect on speaker preferences for selecting dem...

It is often assumed that the semantics of temporal expressions is directly related to the linear time concept familiar from high-school physics—that is, to a model based on the number line. However, there are good reasons for suspecting that such a conception is not the one that our linguistic categories are most directly related to. When-clauses provide an example of the mismatch between lingu...

We present an approach for detecting salient (important) dates in texts in order to automatically build event timelines from a search query (e.g. the name of an event or person, etc.). This work was carried out on a corpus of newswire texts in English provided by the Agence France Presse (AFP). In order to extract salient dates that warrant inclusion in an event timeline, we first recognize and...

We present the TARSQI Toolkit (TTK), a modular system for automatic temporal and event annotation of natural language texts. TTK identifies temporal expressions and events in natural language texts, and parses the document to order events and to anchor them to temporal expressions.

Temporal expressions, such as between 1992 and 2000, are frequent across many kinds of documents. Text retrieval, though, treats them as common terms, thus ignoring their inherent semantics. For queries with a strong temporal component, such as U.S. president 1997, this leads to a decrease in retrieval effectiveness, since relevant documents (e.g., a biography of Bill Clinton containing the afo...