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Handbook of Linguistic Annotation pp 941–968Cite as

ISO-TimeML and the Annotation of  Temporal Information

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Abstract

In this paper we describe ISO-TimeML, an expressive and interoperable specification language for event and temporal expressions in natural language text. Besides annotating times and events, ISO-TimeML aims to capture three additional phenomena relating to temporal information in text: (1) it systematically anchors event predicates to a broad range of temporally denoting expressions; (2) it orders event expressions in text relative to one another, both intra-sententially and in discourse; and (3) it allows for a delayed (underspecified) interpretation of partially determined temporal expressions. We discuss the process involved in creating TimeBank, the first corpus created using the TimeML language, and the adoption of this specification as the core for the creation of ISO-TimeML. Finally, we review the adoption of TimeML or members of the ISO-TimeML family within a number of shared task challenges in the community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    AQUAINT was a multi-project effort funded through ARDA (now IARPA) to improve the performance of question answering systems over free text, such as that encountered on the Web. Cf. www.timeml.org for more details on the program.

  2. 2.

    TIMEX2 introduces a value attribute whose value is an ISO time representation in the ISO 8601 standard.

  3. 3.

    The basic functionality of the SIGNAL tag was introduced by Setzer [23].

  4. 4.

    See Allen [2] for motivation.

  5. 5.

    Funded in the context of the ARDA AQUAINT program, grant number NBCHC040027-MOD-0003.

  6. 6.

    See www.timeml.org for further details on TimeML, TimeBank is distributed free of charge by the Linguistic Data Consortium (www.ldc.upenn.edu), catalog number LDC2006T08.

  7. 7.

    This is different from the set of 13 labels from TimeML. The set of labels for TempEval-1 was simplified to aid data preparation and to reduce the complexity of the task.

  8. 8.

    More details on the corpus and how the annotation extends and differs from ISO-TimeML can be found in [24].

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Acknowledgements

The initial research that went into the development of TimeML and TimeBank was supported by a grant from ARDA’s AQUAINT program, NBCHC040027-MOD-0003. In particular, I would like to thank Kiyong Lee, Jessica Moszkowicz, Roser Saurí, Marc Verhagen, Bran Boguraev, Bob Knippen, Inderjeet Mani, Graham Katz, Rob Gauzauskis, Andrea Setzer, Jerry Hobbs, Ian Pratt-Harman, Drago Radev, Tommaso Caselli, and Andre Bittar. There are several other members of the ISO community who deserve particular thanks as well, including Harry Bunt, Laurent Romary, and Nancy Ide.

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  1. Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 02453, USA

    James Pustejovsky

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, USA

    Nancy Ide

  2. Department of Computer Science, Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA

    James Pustejovsky

Appendix: ISO-TimeML DTD

Appendix: ISO-TimeML DTD

figure v

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Pustejovsky, J. (2017). ISO-TimeML and the Annotation of  Temporal Information. In: Ide, N., Pustejovsky, J. (eds) Handbook of Linguistic Annotation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0881-2_35

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