A novel unsupervised approach for precise temporal slot filling from incomplete and noisy temporal contexts

Abstract

The task of temporal slot filling (TSF) is to extract the values (or called facts) of specific attributes for a given entity from text data and find the time points when the values were valid. It is challenging to find precise time points with incomplete and noisy temporal contexts in the text. In this work, we propose an unsupervised approach of two modules that mutually enhance each other: one is a reliability estimator on fact extractors conditionally to the temporal contexts; the other is a fact trustworthiness estimator based on the extractor's reliability. The iterative learning process reduces the noise of the extractions. Experiments demonstrate that our approach, with the novel design, can accurately and efficiently extract precise temporal facts from newspaper corpora.