Annotation of temporal relations within a discourse

Abstract

In this paper we present an annotation scheme that captures general temporal relations between events expressed in a discourse. The proposed scheme aims to naturally extend the existing tectogrammatic annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank and represents a step towards capturing the cognitive (ontological) content of a discourse. The existence of such an annotation will allow the training and testing of algorithms for automatic extraction of temporal relations which, in turn, contributes to various NLP tasks such as information retrieval and machine translation. 233 sentences of Czech translations of the Wall Street Journal (Penn Treebank) have been annotated so far. We also present statistics on the distribution of respective temporal relations based on this preliminary annotation data as well as the performance of a grammarbased algorithm. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.