Extending TimeML with Typical Durations of Events

Abstract

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 two events overlap or are in sequence often depends very much on their durations.