Temporal Discourse Models for Narrative Structure

Getting a machine to understand human narratives has been a classic challenge for NLP and AI. This paper proposes a new representation for the temporal structure of narratives. The representation is parsimonious, using temporal relations as surrogates for discourse relations. The narrative models, called Temporal Discourse Models, are tree-structured, where nodes include abstract events interpreted as pairs of time points and where the dominance relation is expressed by temporal inclusion. Annotation examples and challenges are discussed, along with a report on progress to date in creating annotated corpora.

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