Telling apart temporal locating adverbials and time-denoting expressions

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the identification of two semantically close categories-temporal locating adverbials and time-denoting expressions. The dividing line between these categories is difficult to draw, inasmuch as there are several phrases that occur with the same surface form in the typical contexts of both of them (e.g. in adverbial position and as the complement of verbs like to date from). These ambivalent phrases include relatively simple expressions like yesterday or last week, but also-a fact that has gone practically unnoticed in the literature-structurally complex ones, like those headed by before, after, when or ago. In this paper, a uniform semantic categorisation of these phrases as mere time-denoting expressions is advocated and some of its consequences for the grammatical system are assessed. The analysis postulates a null locating preposition (with a value close to that of in) in the contexts where the ambivalent forms occur adverbially. A corollary is the partition of the set of particles traditionally classified as temporal locating into two sets: the truly locating ones-like in, during, since or untiland those that are mere heads of (structurally complex) time-denoting expressions-like before, after, between, when, ago, or from.

Subclasses of Temporal and Spatial Phrases in Portuguese – Location <i>vs.</i> Mere Reference

“…Móia 2000Móia , 2001 has emphasized the issue of categorial diversity within this class, claiming that -when temporal location and temporal reference are consideredtwo major distinct, though interrelated, subclasses need be distinguished: (i) temporal locating adjuncts, which are used to associate eventualities with time intervals, asserting when things happened; (ii) timedenoting expressions, which are used simply to identify, or denote, time intervals. The former class is prototypically exemplified by prepositional phrases headed by em ('in'), as in (1); the second, by nominal phrases as o século XX ('the 20th century'), as in (2): (1) O Paulo casou em 1990.…”

Enhancing QA Systems with Complex Temporal Question Processing Capabilities

“…Interest in temporal representation and reasoning has been evolving throughout the years and has resulted in a growing number of meetings related to this topic. We present here, in descending chronological order, the most important ones: TIME ( 2008) is an annual symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning (Demri & Jensen, 2008), it involves different areas including Time in Natural Language; TempEval 2007 (Verhagen et al, 2007) is a workshop held within SemEval-2007 for the evaluation of systems performing Time-Event Temporal Relation Identification; ARTE 2006 is a new workshop focused on Annotating and Reasoning about Time and Events (Ahn, 2006;Dalli & Wilks, 2006;Mani & Wellner, 2006) and was part of the relevant conference COLING-ACL ( 2006) (Pan, Mulkar, & Hobbs, 2006a); Dagstuhl 2005 was a seminar about annotating, extracting and reasoning time and events (Katz, Pustejovsky, & Schilder, 2005); TERN ( 2004) was an international competition in which different systems that identify and normalize temporal expressions were evaluated and compared; TANGO 2003 was specialized in developing an appropriate infrastructure for annotation (Pustejovsky & Mani, 2008); LREC (2002) dedicated a workshop to Annotation Standards for Temporal Information in Natural Language (Mani & Wilson, 2002;Setzer & Gaizauskas, 2002;Saquete, Martínez-Barco, & Muñoz, 2002); ACL (2001) included the Temporal and Spatial Information Processing workshop (Setzer & Gaizauskas, 2001;Filatova & Hovy, 2001;Katz & Arosio, 2001;Moia, 2001;Schilder & Habel, 2001;Wilson, Mani, Sundheim, & Ferro, 2001) and finally, COLING (2000), in which some papers were related to temporal expression identification or temporal databases. It is important to emphasize that all these meetings led to the development of a standard for a specification language for events and temporal expressions and their ordering (TimeML, 2008).…”

Multilingual Extension of Temporal Expression Recognition Using Parallel Corpora

“…Among others, Moia (2001) emphasized the potentialities of such applications for different information retrieval related tasks.…”