Automatic rule generation for time expression normalization

Wentao Ding, Jianhao Chen, Jinmao Li, Yuzhong Qu


Abstract
The understanding of time expressions includes two sub-tasks: recognition and normalization. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the recognition of time expressions while research on normalization has lagged behind. Existing SOTA normalization methods highly rely on rules or grammars designed by experts, which limits their performance on emerging corpora, such as social media texts. In this paper, we model time expression normalization as a sequence of operations to construct the normalized temporal value, and we present a novel method called ARTime, which can automatically generate normalization rules from training data without expert interventions. Specifically, ARTime automatically captures possible operation sequences from annotated data and generates normalization rules on time expressions with common surface forms. The experimental results show that ARTime can significantly surpass SOTA methods on the Tweets benchmark, and achieves competitive results with existing expert-engineered rule methods on the TempEval-3 benchmark.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.269
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3135–3144
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.269
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.269
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wentao Ding, Jianhao Chen, Jinmao Li, and Yuzhong Qu. 2021. Automatic rule generation for time expression normalization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 3135–3144, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic rule generation for time expression normalization (Ding et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.269.pdf
Software:
 2021.findings-emnlp.269.Software.zip
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.269.mp4
Code
 nju-websoft/artime