Brandeis University

Last Updated: 9/20/04

TimeBank

TERQAS Documentation

ESSLLI 2003 Course

Temporal Discourse Parsing

References and Links

Project Definition

The goal of this effort is to develop a robust specification language for events and temporal expressions in natural language. TimeML is designed to address four problems in event and temporal expression markup:

1. Time stamping of events (identifying an event and anchoring it in time);
2. Ordering events with respect to one another (lexical versus discourse properties of ordering);
3. Reasoning with contextually underspecified temporal expressions (temporal functions such as 'last week' and 'two weeks before');
4. Reasoning about the persistence of events (how long does an event or the outcome of an event last).

Efforts surrounding the development and promotion of TimeML have thus far focused on two ARDA-funded workshops, hosted by MITRE's NRRC.

• 2004
  TARSQI: Temporal Awareness and Reasoning Systems for Question Interpretation

• 2003
  TANGO: TimeML Annotation Graphical Organizer

• 2002
  TERQAS: Temporal and Event Recognition for Question Answering Systems

• May 27, 2003
  NAACL-HLT Tutorial: Annotation of Temporal and Event Expressions

• August 2003
  ESSLLI Course: Practical application of temporal and event based reasoning