05151 Summary -- Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events

The main focus of the seminar was on TimeML-based temporal annotation and reasoning. We were concerned with three main points: determining how effectively one can use the TimeML language for consistent annotation, determining how useful such annotation is for further processing, and determining what modifications should be applied to the standard to improve its usefulness in applications such as question-answering and information retrieval

05151 Abstracts Collection -- Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events

From 10.04.05 to 15.04.05, the Dagstuhl Seminar 05151 ``Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Temporal expression normalisation in natural language texts

Automatic annotation of temporal expressions is a research challenge of great interest in the field of information extraction. In this report, I describe a novel rule-based architecture, built on top of a pre-existing system, which is able to normalise temporal expressions detected in English texts. Gold standard temporally-annotated resources are limited in size and this makes research difficult. The proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art systems with respect to TempEval-2 Shared Task (value attribute) and achieves substantially better results with respect to the pre-existing system on top of which it has been developed. I will also introduce a new free corpus consisting of 2822 unique annotated temporal expressions. Both the corpus and the system are freely available on-line.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure, 5 table

ISO-TimeML: An International Standard for Semantic Annotation

International audienceIn this paper, we present ISO-TimeML, a revised and interoperable version of the temporal markup language, TimeML. We describe the changes and enrichments made, while framing the effort in a more general methodology of semantic annotation. In particular, we assume a principled distinction between the annotation of an expression and the representation which that annotation denotes. This involves not only the specification of an annotation language for a particular phenomenon, but also the development of a meta-model that allows one to interpret the syntactic expressions of the specification semantically

Propuesta para la integración de expresiones temporales procedentes de patrimonio documental en un SIG

En este artículo se propone una metodología para la integración de un corpus histórico procedente de textos originales en un Sistema de Información Geográfica (SIG), donde destaca la incorporación de los aspectos temporales del corpus en la base de datos de un SIG. Para ello, se ha utilizado el lenguaje de marcado TimeML que facilita la comunicación entre los SIG y la información procedente de patrimonio cultural. Al amparo de este campo de estudio, el presente trabajo tiene dos objetivos fundamentales: por un lado, la identificación y normalización de expresiones temporales, y por otro lado, la incorporación de la variable temporal extraída de corpus históricos en los SIG

Exploring Different Dimensions of Attention for Uncertainty Detection

Neural networks with attention have proven effective for many natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we develop attention mechanisms for uncertainty detection. In particular, we generalize standardly used attention mechanisms by introducing external attention and sequence-preserving attention. These novel architectures differ from standard approaches in that they use external resources to compute attention weights and preserve sequence information. We compare them to other configurations along different dimensions of attention. Our novel architectures set the new state of the art on a Wikipedia benchmark dataset and perform similar to the state-of-the-art model on a biomedical benchmark which uses a large set of linguistic features.Comment: accepted at EACL 201

Annotation de la temporalité en corpus : contribution à l'amélioration de la norme TimeML

National audienceThis paper reports a critical analysis of the TimeML standard, in the light of a temporal annotation that was conducted on spoken French. It shows that the norm suffers from weaknesses that must be corrected to fit the needs of NLP and corpus linguistics. These limitations concern mainly 1) the separation of different levels of linguistic annotation, 2) the delimitation in the text of the events, and 3) the absence of a bridging temporal relation in the norm.Cet article propose une analyse critique de la norme TimeML à la lumière de l'expérience d'annotation temporelle d'un corpus de français parlé. Il montre que certaines adaptations de la norme seraient conseillées pour répondre aux besoins du TAL et des sciences du langage. Sont étudiées ici les questions de séparation des niveaux d'annotation, de délimitation des éventualités dans le texte et de l'ajout d'une relation temporelle de type associative

Incorporating TimeML into a GIS

This study approaches a methodology for the integration of temporal information belonging to a historical corpus in a Geographic Information System (GIS), with the purpose of analyzing and visualizing the textual information. The selected corpus is composed of business letters of the Castilian merchant Simón Ruiz (1553-1597), in the context of the DynCoopNet Project (Dynamic Complexity of Cooperation-Based Self-Organizing Commercial Networks in the First Global Age), that aims to analyze the dynamic cooperation procedures of social networks. The integration of historical corpus into a GIS has involved the following phases: (1) recognition and normalization of temporal expressions and events in 16th century Castilian following the TimeML annotation guidelines and (2) storage of tagged expressions into a Geodatabase. The implementation of this process in a GIS would allow to later carrying out temporal queries, dynamic visualization of historical events and thus, it addresses the recognition of human activity patterns and behaviours over tim

Annotation des informations temporelles dans des textes en français.

National audienceLe traitement des informations temporelles est crucial pour la compréhension de textes en langue naturelle. Le langage de spécification TimeML a été conçu afin de permettre le repérage et la normalisation des expressions temporelles et des événements dans des textes écrits en anglais. L'objectif des divers projets TimeML a été de formuler un schéma d'annotation pouvant s'appliquer à du texte libre, comme ce que l'on trouve sur le Web, par exemple. Des efforts ont été faits pour l'application de TimeML à d'autres langues que l'anglais, notamment le chinois, le coréen, l'italien, l'espagnol et l'allemand. Pour le français, il y a eu des efforts allant dans ce sens, mais ils sont encore un peu éparpillés. Dans cet article, nous détaillons nos travaux actuels qui visent à élaborer des ressources complètes pour l'annotation de textes en français selon TimeML - notamment un guide d'annotation, un corpus de référence (Gold Standard) et des modules d'annotation automatique