From Semantic Roles to Temporal Information Representation

The automatic treatment of temporal elements of natural language has become a very important issue among NLP community. Recently, TimeML annotation scheme has been adopted as standard for temporal information representation by a large number of researchers. There are few TimeML resources for languages other than English whereas there exist semantic roles annotated corpora and automatic labeling tools for several languages. The objective of this paper is to study if semantic roles resources can be exploited to generate TimeML corpora. An analysis of the similarities and differences between the temporal semantic role and TimeML elements has been carried out, focusing on temporal expressions (TIMEX3). Using this analysis, an approach consisting of a set of transformation rules between semantic roles and TIMEX3 has been implemented. It has been evaluated in TIMEX3 identification for English and Spanish obtaining same quality results (76.85% F β = 1 AVG), which suggests that it could be also valid for other languages.

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