A Semantically Compositional Annotation Scheme for Time Normalization

Steven Bethard, Jonathan Parker


Abstract
We present a new annotation scheme for normalizing time expressions, such as “three days ago”, to computer-readable forms, such as 2016-03-07. The annotation scheme addresses several weaknesses of the existing TimeML standard, allowing the representation of time expressions that align to more than one calendar unit (e.g., “the past three summers”), that are defined relative to events (e.g., “three weeks postoperative”), and that are unions or intersections of smaller time expressions (e.g., “Tuesdays and Thursdays”). It achieves this by modeling time expression interpretation as the semantic composition of temporal operators like UNION, NEXT, and AFTER. We have applied the annotation scheme to 34 documents so far, producing 1104 annotations, and achieving inter-annotator agreement of 0.821.
Anthology ID:
L16-1599
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3779–3786
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1599
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Steven Bethard and Jonathan Parker. 2016. A Semantically Compositional Annotation Scheme for Time Normalization. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 3779–3786, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Semantically Compositional Annotation Scheme for Time Normalization (Bethard & Parker, LREC 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1599.pdf
Code
 bethard/timenorm