Extracting meaning from temporal nouns and temporal prepositions

This article provides a compositional semantics for temporal nouns and temporal prepositions that are annotated as temporal prepositional phrases or noun phrases by an automatic tagging system (e.g., last Monday, on Dec. 1st, for three weeks or before Christmas). Current temporal tagging systems rely on an ad-hoc-representation for temporal date and time expressions, but the more demanding tasks of temporal question-answering and automatic text summarization require a sound logical derivation and representation of temporal expressions. Our proposal draws from two formal accounts of temporal prepositional phrases by Pratt and Francez [2001] and von Stechow [2002b], and is realized within an automatic temporal tagging system for German newspaper articles.

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