Using semantic inference for temporal annotation comparison

The automatic recognition and annotation of temporal expressions as well as event expressions have become active areas of research in computational linguistics, as evidenced by workshops such as the ACL2001 workshop on Temporal and Spatial Information Processing (Harper et al. 2001), the LREC 2002 workshop on Annotation Standards for Temporal Information in Natural Language (Setzer 2002), and the TERQAS1 workshop on Time and Event Recognition for Question-Answering Systems (Pustejovsky. et al. 2003). Temporal information is important to many application areas, including Question Answering, Information Extraction (IE), and Topic Detection and Tracking.To enable the development and evaluation of systems that recognize and annotate temporal information, annotated corpora must be created—and often the goal is to do this automatically. Before this is possible, the annotation scheme must …