Supervised Machine Learning Techniques to Detect TimeML Events in French and English

Identifying events from texts is an information extraction task necessary for many NLP applications. Through the TimeML specifications and TempEval challenges, it has received some attention in recent years. However, no reference result is available for French. In this paper, we try to fill this gap by proposing several event extraction systems, combining for instance Conditional Random Fields, language modeling and k-nearest-neighbors. These systems are evaluated on French corpora and compared with state-of-the-art methods on English. The very good results obtained on both languages validate our approach.

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