TIMELINE: Exhaustive Annotation of Temporal Relations Supporting the Automatic Ordering of Events in News Articles

Sarah Alsayyahi, Riza Batista-Navarro


Abstract
Temporal relation extraction models have thus far been hindered by a number of issues in existing temporal relation-annotated news datasets, including: (1) low inter-annotator agreement due to the lack of specificity of their annotation guidelines in terms of what counts as a temporal relation; (2) the exclusion of long-distance relations within a given document (those spanning across different paragraphs); and (3) the exclusion of events that are not centred on verbs. This paper aims to alleviate these issues by presenting a new annotation scheme that clearly defines the criteria based on which temporal relations should be annotated. Additionally, the scheme includes events even if they are not expressed as verbs (e.g., nominalised events). Furthermore, we propose a method for annotating all temporal relations—including long-distance ones—which automates the process, hence reducing time and manual effort on the part of annotators. The result is a new dataset, the TIMELINE corpus, in which improved inter-annotator agreement was obtained, in comparison with previously reported temporal relation datasets. We report the results of training and evaluating two baseline temporal relation extraction models on the new corpus, and compare them with results obtained on the widely used MATRES corpus.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.1016
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16336–16348
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1016
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.1016
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sarah Alsayyahi and Riza Batista-Navarro. 2023. TIMELINE: Exhaustive Annotation of Temporal Relations Supporting the Automatic Ordering of Events in News Articles. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 16336–16348, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TIMELINE: Exhaustive Annotation of Temporal Relations Supporting the Automatic Ordering of Events in News Articles (Alsayyahi & Batista-Navarro, EMNLP 2023)
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https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.1016.pdf
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