A Sequential Model for Classifying Temporal Relations between Intra-Sentence Events

Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Ruihong Huang


Abstract
We present a sequential model for temporal relation classification between intra-sentence events. The key observation is that the overall syntactic structure and compositional meanings of the multi-word context between events are important for distinguishing among fine-grained temporal relations. Specifically, our approach first extracts a sequence of context words that indicates the temporal relation between two events, which well align with the dependency path between two event mentions. The context word sequence, together with a parts-of-speech tag sequence and a dependency relation sequence that are generated corresponding to the word sequence, are then provided as input to bidirectional recurrent neural network (LSTM) models. The neural nets learn compositional syntactic and semantic representations of contexts surrounding the two events and predict the temporal relation between them. Evaluation of the proposed approach on TimeBank corpus shows that sequential modeling is capable of accurately recognizing temporal relations between events, which outperforms a neural net model using various discrete features as input that imitates previous feature based models.
Anthology ID:
D17-1190
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1796–1802
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1190
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1190
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Prafulla Kumar Choubey and Ruihong Huang. 2017. A Sequential Model for Classifying Temporal Relations between Intra-Sentence Events. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1796–1802, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Sequential Model for Classifying Temporal Relations between Intra-Sentence Events (Choubey & Huang, EMNLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1190.pdf