A Computational Model of the Semantics of Tense and Aspect

Abstract

This paper proposes a solution to the computational task of extracting temporal information from simple declarative sentences based on separating temporal analysis into distinct tasks, each of which has access to a selected portion of the temporal input. The ultimate goal is to represent temporal information as explicitly as possible at each stage of analysis in order to provide the appropriate information for the next stage. Because the representations are constructed incrementally, it is important that they should be explicit about what has been derived so far, yet sufficiently noncommittal to avoid conflicting with subsequent processing