The Annotation of Temporal Information In Natural Language Sentences

In interpreting narratives the most essential information to be extracted is who did what where, when, and why, the classic journalistic imperatives. The ‘who’ and ‘what’ information is usually expressed overtly, and this has made it possible to apply stochastic techniques to problems in this domain (such as word-sense classification and argument structure mapping). The ‘when’ and ‘where’ information is, however, often left implicit, or, at least, only partially specified. The ‘why’ information is rarely explicit. Formal semantic theories of temporal interpretation (e.g. Kamp and Reyle 1993, Ogihara 1996, Abusch 1997) have been quite successful at specifying the contribution that such overt markers as tenses and temporal adverbials make to the meaning of a sentence or discourse.