SpatialML is an annotation scheme for marking up references to places in natural language. It covers both named and nominal references to places, grounding them where possible with geo-coordinates, including both relative and absolute locations, and characterizes relationships among places in terms of a region calculus. A freely available annotation editor has been developed for SpatialML, along with a corpus of annotated documents released by the Linguistic Data Consortium. Inter-annotator agreement on SpatialML is 77.0 F-measure for extents on that corpus. An automatic tagger for SpatialML extents scores 78.5 F-measure. A disambiguator scores 93.0 F-measure and 93.4 Predictive Accuracy. In adapting the extent tagger to new domains, merging the training data from the above corpus with annotated data in the new domain provides the best performance.

Temporal annotation is a complex task characterized by low markup speed and low inter-annotator agreements scores. Tango is a graphical annotation tool for temporal relations. It is developed for the TimeML annotation language and allows annotators to build a graph that resembles a timeline. Temporal relations are added by selecting events and drawing labeled arrows between them. Tango is integrated with a temporal closure component and includes features like SmartLink, user prompting and automatic linking of time expressions. Tango has been used to create two corpora with temporal annotation, TimeBank and the AQUAINT Opinion corpus.

We describe an interlingua-based approach to machine translation, in which a DRS representation of the source text is used as the interlingua representation. A target DRS is then created and used to construct the target text. We describe several advantages of this level of representation. We also argue that problems of translation mismatch and divergence should properly be viewed not as translation problems per se but rather as generation problems, although the source text can be used to guide the target generator. The system we have built relics exclusively on monolingual linguistic descriptions that are also, for the most part, bi-directional.