Enriching TimeBank: Towards a more precise annotation of temporal relations in a text

Volker Gast, Lennart Bierkandt, Stephan Druskat, Christoph Rzymski


Abstract
We propose a way of enriching the TimeML annotations of TimeBank by adding information about the Topic Time in terms of Klein (1994). The annotations are partly automatic, partly inferential and partly manual. The corpus was converted into the native format of the annotation software GraphAnno and POS-tagged using the Stanford bidirectional dependency network tagger. On top of each finite verb, a FIN-node with tense information was created, and on top of any FIN-node, a TOPICTIME-node, in accordance with Klein’s (1994) treatment of finiteness as the linguistic correlate of the Topic Time. Each TOPICTIME-node is linked to a MAKEINSTANCE-node representing an (instantiated) event in TimeML (Pustejovsky et al. 2005), the markup language used for the annotation of TimeBank. For such links we introduce a new category, ELINK. ELINKs capture the relationship between the Topic Time (TT) and the Time of Situation (TSit) and have an aspectual interpretation in Klein’s (1994) theory. In addition to these automatic and inferential annotations, some TLINKs were added manually. Using an example from the corpus, we show that the inclusion of the Topic Time in the annotations allows for a richer representation of the temporal structure than does TimeML. A way of representing this structure in a diagrammatic form similar to the T-Box format (Verhagen, 2007) is proposed.
Anthology ID:
L16-1608
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3844–3850
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1608
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Volker Gast, Lennart Bierkandt, Stephan Druskat, and Christoph Rzymski. 2016. Enriching TimeBank: Towards a more precise annotation of temporal relations in a text. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 3844–3850, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Enriching TimeBank: Towards a more precise annotation of temporal relations in a text (Gast et al., LREC 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1608.pdf
Data
TimeBank