Temporal Relations Annotation and Extrapolation Based on Semi-intervals and Boundig Relations

Alejandro Pimentel, Gemma Bel Enguix, Gerardo Sierra Martínez, Azucena Montes


Abstract
The computational treatment of temporal relations is based on the work of Allen, who establishes 13 different types, and Freksa, who designs a cognitive procedure to manage them. Freksa’s notation is not widely used because, although it has cognitive and expressive advantages, it is too complex from the computational perspective. This paper proposes a system for the annotation and management of temporal relations that combines the richness and expressiveness of Freksa’s approach with the simplicity of Allen’s notation. Our method is summarized in the application of bounding relations, thanks to which it is possible to obtain the temporary representation of complete neighborhoods capable of representing vague temporal relations such as those that can be frequently found in a text. Such advantages are obtained without the need to greatly increase the complexity of the labeling process since the markup language is almost the same as TimeML, to which only a second temporary “relType”’ type label relationship is added. Our experiments show that the temporal relationships that present vagueness are in fact much more common than those in which a single relationship can be established precisely. For these reasons, our new labeling system achieves a more agreeable representation of temporal relations.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.294
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3313–3323
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.294
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.294
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alejandro Pimentel, Gemma Bel Enguix, Gerardo Sierra Martínez, and Azucena Montes. 2020. Temporal Relations Annotation and Extrapolation Based on Semi-intervals and Boundig Relations. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 3313–3323, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Temporal Relations Annotation and Extrapolation Based on Semi-intervals and Boundig Relations (Pimentel et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.294.pdf