STEEL: A spatio-temporal extended event language for tracking epidemic spread from outbreak reports

We propose a Spatio-Temporal Extended Event Language (STEEL) for representing and reasoning about events that are described in outbreak reports. This language is an extension of the Event Calculus based on mereotopological relationships and structured conglomeration of events, in which time is replaced with spatiotemporal location. It allows representing and building aggregates of events according to the spatiotemporal location of their occurrence. In a proof a concept study, we aimed at comparing the performances of an experimental implementation in Prolog of this language with 3 human experts during a question-answering task on a trial corpus of 35 outbreak reports. This experiment showed experts' agreement with the system's responses.

[1]  Antonis C. Kakas,et al.  E-RES: A System for Reasoning about Actions, Events and Observations , 2000, ArXiv.

[2]  Antonis C. Kakas,et al.  A Simple Declarative Language for Describing Narratives With Actions , 1997, J. Log. Program..

[3]  Antony Galton,et al.  Towards an Integrated Logic of Space, Time and Motion , 1993, IJCAI.

[4]  James F. Allen.  Towards a General Theory of Action and Time , 1984, Artif. Intell..

[5]  Anthony G. Cohn,et al.  Continuous Transitions in Mereotopology , 2001 .

[6]  R. Bajcsy.  IJCAI-93 : proceedings of the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence , Chambéry, France, August 28-September 3, 1993 , 1993 .

[7]  Antonis C. Kakas,et al.  E-RES: Reasoning about Actions, Events and Observations , 2001, LPNMR.

[8]  Markus Knauff,et al.  The cognitive adequacy of Allen's interval calculus for qualitative spatial representation and reasoning , 1999, Spatial Cogn. Comput..

[9]  M. Shanahan.  Solving the frame problem , 1997 .

[10]  J Woodall,et al.  Official versus unofficial outbreak reporting through the Internet. , 1997, International journal of medical informatics.

[11]  Laure Vieu,et al.  Toward a Geometry of Common Sense: A Semantics and a Complete Axiomatization of Mereotopology , 1995, IJCAI.

[12]  Brandon Bennett,et al.  Space, time, matter and things , 2001, FOIS.

[13]  Nissim Francez,et al.  Temporal Prepositions and Temporal Generalized Quantifiers , 2001 .

[14]  Anthony G. Cohn,et al.  Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Continuity , 2001, COSIT.

[15]  Johan van Benthem,et al.  Handbook of Logic and Language , 1996 .

[16]  Jean-Paul Sansonnet,et al.  A Spatio-temporal Model for the Representation of Situations Described in Narrative Texts , 2000, Natural Language Processing.

[17]  Chitta Baral,et al.  Reasoning About Effects of Concurrent Actions , 1997, J. Log. Program..

[18]  Yuval Shahar,et al.  A Framework for Knowledge-Based Temporal Abstraction , 1997, Artif. Intell..

[19]  Christina Schokkenbroek,et al.  News Stories , 1999 .

[20]  Brian Knight,et al.  Reasoning about change over time: actions, events, and their effects. , 1998 .

[21]  M. Roux,et al.  Understanding of medico-technical reports , 2000, Artif. Intell. Medicine.

[22]  Ralph Grishman,et al.  Information extraction for enhanced access to disease outbreak reports , 2002, J. Biomed. Informatics.

[23]  Angelo Montanari,et al.  A Guided Tour through some Extensions of the Event Calculus , 2000, Comput. Intell..

[24]  Robert J. Gaizauskas,et al.  Annotating Events and Temporal Information in Newswire Texts , 2000, LREC.

[25]  Tran Cao Son,et al.  A Transition Function Based Characterization of Actions with Delayed and Continuous Effects , 2002, KR.

[26]  Ralph Grishman,et al.  Diversity of Scenarios in Information extraction , 2002, LREC.

[27]  David I. Beaver,et al.  The Handbook of Logic and Language , 1997 .

[28]  Eduard Hovy,et al.  Assigning Time-Stamps to Event-Clauses , 2001, The Language of Time - A Reader.

[29]  Rob Miller,et al.  Situation Calculus Specifications for Event Calculus Logic Programs , 1995, LPNMR.

[30]  David L. Buckeridge,et al.  Knowledge-based bioterrorism surveillance , 2002, AMIA.

[31]  Murray Shanahan,et al.  Narratives in the Situation Calculus , 1994, J. Log. Comput..

[32]  C Combi,et al.  Temporal reasoning and temporal data maintenance in medicine: Issues and challenges , 1997, Comput. Biol. Medicine.

[33]  Angelo Montanari,et al.  A calculus of macro-events: progress report , 2000, Proceedings Seventh International Workshop on Temporal Representation and Reasoning. TIME 2000.

[34]  Antony Galton,et al.  A Critical Examination of Allen's Theory of Action and Time , 1990, Artif. Intell..

[35]  Robert A. Kowalski,et al.  Variants of the Event Calculus , 1995, ICLP.

[36]  Lynette Hirschman,et al.  Real users, real data, real problems: the MiTAP system for monitoring bio events , 2002 .