These nouns that hide events: An initial detection

Abstract

Many studies have been devoted to the temporal analysis of texts, and more precisely to the tagging of temporal entities and relations occurring in texts. Among these lasts, the various avatars of events in their multiples occurring forms has been tackled by numerous works. We describe here a method for the detection of noun phrases denoting events. Our approach is based on the implementation of a simple linguistic test proposed by linguists for this task. Our method is applied on two different corpuses; the first is composed of newspaper articles and the second, a much larger one, rests on an interface for automatically querying the Yahoo search engine. Primary results are encouraging and increasing the size of the learning corpus should allow for a real statistical validation of the results. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.