Abstract
TimeML is an expressive language for temporal information, but its rich representational properties raise the bar for traditional information extraction methods when applied to the task of text-to-TimeML analysis. We analyse the extent to which TimeBank, the reference corpus for TimeML, supports development of TimeML-compliant analytics. The first release of the corpus exhibits challenging characteristics: small size and some noise. Nonetheless, a particular design of a time annotator trained on TimeBank is able to exploit the data in an implementation which deploys a hybrid analytical strategy of mixing aggressive finite-state processing over linguistic annotations with a state-of-the-art machine learning technique capable of leveraging large amounts of unannotated data. We present our design, in light of encouraging performance results; we also interpret these results in relation to a close analysis of TimeBank’s annotation ‘profile’. We conclude that even the first release of the corpus is invaluable; we further argue for more infrastructure work needed to create a larger and more robust reference corpus.
This work was supported in part by the ARDA NIMD (Novel Intelligence and Massive Data) program PNWD-SW-6059.
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Boguraev, B., Ando, R.K. (2007). Effective Use of TimeBank for TimeML Analysis. In: Schilder, F., Katz, G., Pustejovsky, J. (eds) Annotating, Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4795. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-75989-8_4
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