Good Night at 4 pm?! Time Expressions in Different Cultures

Abstract

We propose the task of culture-specific time expression grounding, i.e. mapping from expressions such as “morning” in English or “manhã” in Portuguese to specific hours in the day. We propose 3 language-agnostic methods, one of which achieves promising results on gold standard annotations that we collected for a small number of languages. We then apply this method to 27 languages and analyze the similarities across languages in the grounding of time expressions.