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Automatic transformation from TIDES to TimeML annotation

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Abstract

Until recently, most systems performing temporal extraction and reasoning from text have focused on recognizing and normalizing temporal expressions alone, for which the TIDES annotation scheme has been adopted. Temporal awareness of a text, however, involves not only identifying the temporal expressions, but the events which these expressions anchor, as well as other events which must be ordered relative to them. Because of these broader concerns, TimeML has been developed as an annotation specification that encompasses not only temporal expressions, but all temporally relevant aspects of a text. The annotation schemes, however, are not interchangeable, resulting in incompatible corpora and accompanying extraction algorithms for each standard. In this paper, we describe an automatic migration process from the TIMEX2 tags of TIDES to the TIMEX3 tags of TimeML. This transformation procedure has been implemented and evaluated with two different corpora, obtaining 93.3 and 89.2% overall F-Measure respectively.

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Notes

  1. http://fofoca.mitre.org/annotation_guidelines/2005_timex2_standard_v1.1.pdf.

  2. http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/ace/.

  3. http://timexportal.wikidot.com/systems.

  4. Section 5 in http://fofoca.mitre.org/annotation_guidelines/2005_timex2_standard_v1.1.pdf.

  5. Section 2.2.1.2 in http://www.timeml.org/site/publications/timeMLdocs/annguide_1.2.1.pdf.

  6. ti = t1, t2, t3, ….

  7. A non-consuming TIMEX3 is added to capture the duration that such range expressions introduce.

  8. A POSTAGGER is used for obtaining the preposition.

  9. getVal(tid) gets the val attribute (ISO format) for the expression identifies as tid. getValTF (temporalFunction, val) applies the respective function resolving the expression using the ISO format date, returning an ISO format date also.

  10. According to TIDES 2005 guidelines AS_OF is only used with the PRESENT_REF token, therefore the transformation follows the same performance as WITHIN.

  11. Only the boundaries of the expression are shown since this type of expressions were not being resolved in previous annotation guidelines.

  12. The current specification will reflect this proposal regarding how temporal expressions in specifier (genitive) position should be annotated: namely, they will be marked as indicated in the example 25.

  13. Only the items of the annotation related to this problem are shown for clarity.

  14. More information: timex2.mitre.org/tern_2004/ferro2_TERN2004_annotation_sanitized.pdf page 10.

  15. http://www.timeml.org/site/tarsqi/modules/gutime/index.html.

  16. http://timex2.mitre.org/taggers/timex2_taggers.html.

  17. More information: http://www.timeml.org/site/timebank/documentation-1.2.html#iaa.

  18. http://fofoca.mitre.org/tern_2004/tern_evalplan-2004.29apr04.pdf.

  19. http://gplsi.dlsi.ua.es/demos/T2T3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Language Processing and Information System Group, University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Estela Saquete

  2. Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA

    James Pustejovsky

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  1. Estela Saquete
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Correspondence to Estela Saquete.

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Saquete, E., Pustejovsky, J. Automatic transformation from TIDES to TimeML annotation. Lang Resources & Evaluation 45, 495–523 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-011-9147-y

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