From TimeML to TPL

This paper describes a subset of the temporal mark-up language TimeML, and explains its relation to various formalisms found in the literature on interval temporal logic. The subset of TimeML we describe can be viewed as an interval temporal logic with a tractable satisfiability problem, but very limited expressive power. Most crucially, that logic does not permit quantification over events. The contribution of this paper is to point out that, by choosing an appropriate interval temporal logic, it is possible to introduce quantification into representations of event-structure without sacrificing decidability.