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...

In this paper, we demonstrate how to extend TimeML, a rich specification language for event and temporal expressions in text, with the implicit typical durations of events, temporal information in text that has hitherto been largely unexploited. Event duration information can be very important in applications in which the time course of events is to be extracted from text. For example, whether ...

We describe FSS-TimEx, a module for the recognition and normalization of temporal expressions we submitted to Task A and B of the TempEval-3 challenge. FSS-TimEx was developed as part of a multilingual event extraction system, Nexus, which runs on top of the EMM news processing engine. It consists of finite-state rule cascades, using minimalistic text processing stages and simple heuristics to ...

Answering questions that ask about temporal information involves several forms of inference. First, relations between events and temporal expressions need to be inferred, either in the question or in the answer. Second, semantic inference between events, entities and their definitions needs to be performed. Sometimes, semantic inference employs aspectual information to relate events expressed b...

In this paper we present the DANTE system, a tagger for temporal expressions in English documents. DANTE performs both recognition and normalization of these expressions in accordance with the TIMEX2 annotation standard. The system is built on modular principles, with a clear separation between the recognition and normalisation components. The interface between these components is based on our ...

The reliable extraction of knowledge from text requires an appropriate treatment of the time at which reported events take place. Unfortunately, there are very few annotated data sets that support the development of techniques for event time-stamping and tracking the progression of time through a narrative. In this paper, we present a new corpus of temporally-rich documents sourced from English...

The aim of this paper is to apply TimeML, an annotation scheme for events and temporal expressions, to the annotation of Korean in an attempt to test its multilingual extendability. TimeML has been well validated by the successful annotation of a corpus of 186 news articles and some other documents in English. One of its remaining tasks, however, is multilingual extension. This paper aims at co...

Date and time descriptors play an important role in cultural record keeping. As part of digital access and information retrieval on heritage databases it is becoming increasingly important that date descriptors are not matched as strings but that their semantics are properly understood and interpreted by man and machine alike. This paper describes a prototype system designed to resolve temporal...

A new direction in improving modern dialogue systems is to make a human-machine dialogue more similar to a human-human dialogue. This can be done by adding more input modalities, e.g. facial expression recognition. A common problem in a human-machine dialogue where the angry face may give a clue is the recurrent misunderstanding of the user by the system. This paper describes recognizing facial...