Automatically Ordering Events and Times in Text

Abstract

The ability to describe the order of events is crucial for effective communication. It is used to describe causality, to plan and to relay stories. This temporal ordering can be expressed linguistically in a variety of ways. For example, one may use tense to describe the relation between the time of speaking and other events, or use a temporal conjunction to temporal situate an event relative to time. This ordering remains the hardest task in processing time in text. Very sophisticated approaches have yielded only small improvements over initial attempts. This book covers relevant background and discusses the problem, and goes on to conduct an analysis of temporal ordering information. This break the types of information used into different groups. Two major sources of information are identified that provide typing information for two segments: relations explicitly described by a signal word, and relations involving a shift of tense and aspect. Following this, the book investigate automatic temporal relation typing in both these segments, presenting results, introducing new methods and a generating set of new language resources.