The Unreality of Time

Tense, aspect and mood

Most of the research on temporal tagging so far is done for processing English text documents. There are hardly any multilingual temporal taggers supporting more than two languages. Recently, the temporal tagger HeidelTime has been made publicly available, supporting the integration of new languages by developing language-dependent resources without modifying the source code.In this article, we describe our work on developing such resources for two Asian and two Romance languages: Arabic, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Italian. While temporal tagging of the two Romance languages has been addressed before, there has been almost no research on Arabic and Vietnamese temporal tagging so far. Furthermore, we analyze language-dependent challenges for temporal tagging and explain the strategies we followed to address them. Our evaluation results on publicly available and newly annotated corpora demonstrate the high quality of our new resources for the four languages, which we make publicly available to the research community.

Time for More Languages: Temporal Tagging of Arabic, Italian, Spanish, and Vietnamese

Besprechungen - Comptes rendus - Sémantique de la temporalité en français. Un modèle calculatoire et cognitif du temps et de l'aspect

The book offers a detailed guide to temporal ordering, exploring open problems in the field and providing solutions and extensive analysis. It addresses the challenge of automatically ordering events and times in text. Aided by TimeML, it also describes and presents concepts relating to time in easy-to-compute terms. Working out the order that events and times happen has proven difficult for computers, since the language used to discuss time can be vague and complex. Mapping out these concepts for a computational system, which does not have its own inherent idea of time, is, unsurprisingly, tough. Solving this problem enables powerful systems that can plan, reason about events, and construct stories of their own accord, as well as understand the complex narratives that humans express and comprehend so naturally. This book presents a theory and data-driven analysis of temporal ordering, leading to the identification of exactly what is difficult about the task. It then proposes and evaluates machine-learning solutions for the major difficulties. It is a valuable resource for those working in machine learning for natural language processing as well as anyone studying time in language, or involved in annotating the structure of time in documents.

Automatically Ordering Events and Times in Text

Cet article aborde le probleme de la representation formelle des expressions calendaires et en presente une analyse fonctionnelle, fondee sur la representation categorique des ordinaux. Il expose ensuite un projet d'aide a la lecture d'un texte biographique long selon une navigation temporelle.

Représentation des expressions calendaires dans les textes : vers une application à la lecture assistée de biographies

Temporal expressions that refer to a part of a calendar area in terms of common calendar divisions are studied. Our claim is that such a "calendar expression" (CE) can be described by a succession of operators operating on a calendar base (CB). These operators are categorized: a pointing operator that transform a CB into a CE; a focalizing/shifting operator that reduces or shifts the CE into another CE, and finally a zoning operator that provides the wanted CE from this last CE. Relying on these operators, a set of annotations is presented which are used to automatically annotate biographic texts. A software application, plugged in the platform Navitext, is described that builds a calendar view of a biographic text.

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00321379/document

Representing and Visualizing Calendar Expressions in Texts

An analysis of deictic temporal reference using major calendar units (day, year, week, month) and their divisions (days of the week, parts of day). Our analysis shows systematic inter-linguistic tendencies et indicates that each type of unit encodes different information, affecting their capacity to function independently as temporal markers, in the absence of additional linguistic or extra-linguistic elements.

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01059978/document

Proximal Deixis with Calendar Terms: Cross-linguistic Patterns of Temporal Reference

Cet article aborde l'etude des expressions temporelles qui font reference directement a des unites de temps relatives aux divisions courantes des calendriers, que nous qualifions d'expressions calendaires (EC). Nous proposons une modelisation de ces expressions en definissant une algebre d'operateurs qui sont lies aux classes de marqueurs linguistiques qui apparaissent dans les EC. A partir de notre modelisation, une vue calendaire est construite dans la plate-forme de visualisation et navigation textuelle NaviTexte, visant le support a la lecture de textes. Enfin, nous concluons sur les perspectives offertes par le developpement d'une premiere application de navigation temporelle.

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00275138/document

Représentation algébrique des expressions calendaires et vue calendaire d'un texte

Nous presentons un cadre unique de description des differents modeles referentiels et proceduraux de descriptions des temps verbaux, fonde sur la notion de \emph{points specieux}, associee a celle de neutralite de la forme des extensions temporelles des elements des modeles. Ce cadre permet a la fois la description et le calcul des relations decrites qui s'expriment sous la forme de S-langages \cite{Schwer2007, DurandSchwer2008} reecrits dans l'esprit de Reichenbach. Nous montrons, a travers l'examen des theories de Port-Royal (1667), de l'Abbe Girard (1747), de Beauzee (1767) et de Reichenbach (1947) comment le systeme neo-Reichenbachien de Co Vet (2007) s'ancre dans une tradition de definition des temps verbaux du francais qui d'une part tend a se degager des contraintes sur le nombre, la nature et les formes des reperes necessaires a leurs expressions relationnelles et d'autre part donne plus d'importance a ce qu'emporte d'universel l'evenance avec elle, c'est-a-dire non la forme de son extension temporelle (encore presente chez Reichenbach) mais son "aura" temporelle (apportee par Co Vet).

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00403655/document

Sylviane R. Schwer

Papers

Représentation des expressions calendaires dans les textes : vers une application à la lecture assistée de biographies

Representing and Visualizing Calendar Expressions in Texts

Proximal Deixis with Calendar Terms: Cross-linguistic Patterns of Temporal Reference

Représentation algébrique des expressions calendaires et vue calendaire d'un texte

Représentation du temps, relations temporelles et théories des temps verbaux.