Temporality as seen through translation: a case study on Hindi texts

Abstract

Temporality has significantly contributed to various aspects of Natural Language Processing applications. In this paper, we determine the extent to which temporal orientation is preserved when a sentence is translated manually and automatically from the Hindi language to the English language. We show that the manually and automatically identified temporal orientation in English translated (both manual and automatic) sentences provides a good match with the temporal orientation of the Hindi texts. We also find that the task of manual temporal annotation becomes difficult in the translated texts while the automatic temporal processing system manages to correctly capture temporal information from the translations