CTEMP: A Chinese Temporal Parser for Extracting and Normalizing Temporal Information

Temporal information is useful in many NLP applications, such as information extraction, question answering and summarization. In this paper, we present a temporal parser for extracting and normalizing temporal expressions from Chinese texts. An integrated temporal framework is proposed, which includes basic temporal concepts and the classification of temporal expressions. The identification of temporal expressions is fulfilled by powerful chart-parsing based on grammar rules and constraint rules. We evaluated the system on a substantial corpus and obtained promising results.