The Specification Language TimeML

Abstract The automatic recognition of temporal and event expressions in natural language text has recently become an active area of research in computational linguistics and semantics. In this paper, we report on TimeML, a specification language for events and temporal expressions, which was developed in the context of a six-month workshop, TERQAS, funded under the auspices of the AQUAINT program. The ARDA-funded program AQUAINT is a multiproject effort to improve the performance of question answering systems over free text, such as that encountered on the Web.