Temporally Anchoring and Ordering Events in News

This paper describes a domain-independent approach to temporally anchoring and ordering events in news. The focus is on event-event and event-time linking. The approach involves mixed-initiative corpus annotation, with automatic preprocessing to identify clause structure, tense, aspect, and temporal adverbials. A controlled experiment reveals the capabilities of humans in ordering events in news. The paper then develops and evaluates two different approaches to machine learning of ordering information: learning from event-event ordering judgments, and learning from event-time anchoring judgments.

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

[2]  M. Garman,et al.  Tense and aspect , 1986 .

[3]  James F. Allen.  Natural language understanding , 1987, Bejnamin/Cummings series in computer science.

[4]  Bonnie L. Webber,et al.  Tense as Discourse Anaphor , 1988, CL.

[5]  Mark Steedman,et al.  Temporal Ontology and Temporal Reference , 1988, CL.

[6]  Rebecca J. Passonneau,et al.  A Computational Model of the Semantics of Tense and Aspect , 1988, CL.

[7]  Chung Hee Hwang,et al.  Tense Trees as the “Fine Structure” of Discourse , 1992, ACL.

[8]  William W. Cohen.  Fast Effective Rule Induction , 1995, ICML.

[9]  Marc Moens,et al.  Algorithms for Analysing the Temporal Structure of Discourse , 1995, EACL.

[10]  Steven P. Abney.  Partial parsing via finite-state cascades , 1996, Natural Language Engineering.

[11]  Bonnie J. Dorr,et al.  Deriving Verbal and Compositonal Lexical Aspect for NLP Applications , 1997, ACL.

[12]  Janyce Wiebe,et al.  An Empirical Approach to Temporal Reference Resolution , 1997, EMNLP.

[13]  The Theory and Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization , 2000 .

[14]  Inderjeet Mani,et al.  Robust Temporal Processing of News , 2000, ACL.

[15]  Robert J. Gaizauskas,et al.  A Pilot Study On Annotating Temporal Relations In Text , 2001, ACL 2001.

[16]  Laure Vieu,et al.  Temporal Information And Discourse Relations In Narratives: The Role Of French Connectives ‘Puis’ And ‘Un Peu Plus Tard’ , 2001, ACL 2001.

[17]  Ellen M. Voorhees,et al.  Overview of the TREC 2002 Question Answering Track , 2003, TREC.

[18]  Regina Barzilay,et al.  Inferring Strategies for Sentence Ordering in Multidocument News Summarization , 2002, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[19]  Inderjeet Mani,et al.  Annotating temporal information: from theory to practice , 2002 .

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

[21]  David R. Dowty.  The effects of aspectual class on the temporal structure of discourse: semantics or pragmatics? , 1986, The Language of Time - A Reader.

[22]  Alan E. Bell.  News Stories as Narratives , 2005, The Language of Time - A Reader.

[23]  Hans Reichenbach,et al.  The Tenses of Verbs , 2005, The Language of Time - A Reader.

[24]  Alex Lascarides,et al.  Temporal interpretation, discourse relations and commonsense entailment , 1993, The Language of Time - A Reader.