TEMPO: A Temporal Sub-Parser for Modern Greek

This paper describes a temporal parser (TEMPO) introducing a semantic approach to the detection and analysis of quantifiers of time within simple texts. TEMPO processes expressions which implicitly contain a date, like "last Sunday", "two days ago" etc., and extracts the exact date. It uses a keyword-driven parsing technique to spot the quantifiers and then separates segments of the sentence around the keywords and passes them to a semantic DCG parser. Though developed for Greek, the presented scheme can be easily transferred to other languages. TEMPO might prove useful in the automatic processing of special kings of documents which require the extraction of time information, such as applications, legal documents, contracts, etc.