TemporalInformationExtraction.ppt

Temporal Information Extraction Inderjeet Mani imani@ Outline Introduction Linguistic Theories AI Theories Annotation Schemes Rule-based and machine-learning methods. Challenges Links Motivation: Question-Answering When is Ramadan this year? What was the largest U.S. military operation since Vietnam? Tell me the best time of the year to go cherry-picking. How often do you feed a pet gerbil? Is Gates currently CEO of Microsoft? Did the Enron merger with Dynegy take place? How long did the hostage situation in Beirut last? What is the current unemployment rate? How many Iraqi civilian casualties were there in the first week of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? Who was Secretary of Defense during the Gulf War? Motivation: Coherent and Faithful Summaries Single-document sentence extraction summarizers are plagued by dangling references especially temporal ones Multi-Document summarizers can be misled by the weakness of vocabulary overlap methods leads to inappropriate merging of distinct events An Example Story Feb. 18, 2004 Yesterday Holly was running a marathon when she twisted her ankle. David had pushed her. Temporal Information Extraction Problem Input: A natural language discourse Output: representation of events and their temporal relations IE Methodology Theories Linguistic Theories Events Event Structure (event subclasses and parts) Tense (indicates location of event in time, via verb inflections, modals, auxiliaries, etc.) Grammatical Aspect (indicates whether event is ongoing, finished, completed) Time Adverbials Relations between events and/or times temporal relations we will also need discourse relations Tense All languages that have tense (in the semantic sense of locating events in time) can express location in time Location can be expressed relative to a deictic center that is the current ‘moment’ of speech, or ‘speech time’, or ‘speech point’ e.g., tomorrow, yesterday, etc. Languages can also express temporal locations relative to a coordinate system