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A Revised Template Description for Time (v3)

1 Introduction

The existing template descriptions for the time object in the Tipster domain are inadequate for several reasons. First, the range of legitimate possible fills is too narrow to capture the range of observable data in the language (e.g.,as witnessed in the corpus). Second, the option of providing a "string fill" as the value to a temporal relation, although facilitating scoring in the short term, is inadequate for characterizing the denotational semantics of the temporal expression, and how it modifies the entities and events in the text.

After making extensive studies of temporal expressions in the Tipster corpus, we suggest a modified model for interpreting temporal expressions, which is not only descriptively adequate, but has a simple, straightforward interpretation in an interval-based temporal logic.

We briefly describe the basic model for mapping from text in the source language (viz. the language of the corpus) to the template description language, which we call Tipsterese. Tipsterese expressions are then mapped into a denotational semantics, which we will not describe in this note (cf. Pustejovsky and Busa (in preparation)). There are two major aspects to the model proposed here:

a. We provide unique interpretations in Tipsterese for all temporal connectives in the corpus language.

b. We enrich the primitive vocabulary of slot fill objects to include temporal modifiers such as mid-, early, and late, and time expressions serving as cyclic definite descriptions, such as 1st quarter, spring, and summer.

The syntax of the time template is repeated below, where D refers to day values, M refers to month values, and Y refers to years.

<TIME> :=
       AFTER:  [DDMMYY]
       BEFORE: [DDMMYY]
       DURING: [DDMMYY]
       ON:     [DDMMYY]
A Revised Template Description for Time (v3) - 07 JUN 95
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