Model-Portability Experiments for Textual Temporal Analysis

We explore a semi-supervised approach for improving the portability of time expression recognition to non-newswire domains: we generate additional training examples by substituting temporal expression words with potential synonyms. We explore using synonyms both from WordNet and from the Latent Words Language Model (LWLM), which predicts synonyms in context using an unsupervised approach. We evaluate a state-of-the-art time expression recognition system trained both with and without the additional training examples using data from TempEval 2010, Reuters and Wikipedia. We find that the LWLM provides substantial improvements on the Reuters corpus, and smaller improvements on the Wikipedia corpus. We find that WordNet alone never improves performance, though intersecting the examples from the LWLM and WordNet provides more stable results for Wikipedia.