TIMEN: An Open Temporal Expression Normalisation Resource

Hector Llorens, Leon Derczynski, Robert Gaizauskas, Estela Saquete


Abstract
Temporal expressions are words or phrases that describe a point, duration or recurrence in time. Automatically annotating these expressions is a research goal of increasing interest. Recognising them can be achieved with minimally supervised machine learning, but interpreting them accurately (normalisation) is a complex task requiring human knowledge. In this paper, we present TIMEN, a community-driven tool for temporal expression normalisation. TIMEN is derived from current best approaches and is an independent tool, enabling easy integration in existing systems. We argue that temporal expression normalisation can only be effectively performed with a large knowledge base and set of rules. Our solution is a framework and system with which to capture this knowledge for different languages. Using both existing and newly-annotated data, we present results showing competitive performance and invite the IE community to contribute to a knowledge base in order to solve the temporal expression normalisation problem.
Anthology ID:
L12-1015
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet Uğur Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3044–3051
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/128_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hector Llorens, Leon Derczynski, Robert Gaizauskas, and Estela Saquete. 2012. TIMEN: An Open Temporal Expression Normalisation Resource. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 3044–3051, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
TIMEN: An Open Temporal Expression Normalisation Resource (Llorens et al., LREC 2012)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/128_Paper.pdf