Picking reference events from tense trees

In this paper, we propose an annotation scheme for the manual annotation of tense and aspect in natural language corpora, as well as an implementation using GraphAnno, a configurable tool for manual multi- level annotation. The annotation scheme is based on Klein’s (1994) theory of tense and aspect, arguably the most widely accepted theory in this domain (cf. also Klein and Li 2009). One of the most important features of Klein’s theory is that in addition to the time span during which a situation obtains (the ‘time of situation’/TSit), it makes use of the concept of ‘Topic Time’ (TT), which is related to, but different from, Reichenbach’s (1947) reference point ‘R’ (cf. Derczynski and Gaizauskas 2013). Given that the resulting annotations cannot be mapped one-to-one to words or constituents, and as they are partially retrieved from the context, a semantic layer of annotation is needed, in addition to the structural one. The multi-level approach advocated here also allows us to annotate temporal relations across sentences. Section 2 provides some background on GraphAnno. Some ontological prerequisites of the anno- tation of tense and aspect are established in Section 3, and the concept of ‘Topic Time’ is introduced. Sections 4 and 5 demonstrate the annotation of temporal relations within and beyond the sentence, re- spectively. Section 6 describes the query language of GraphAnno, and Section 7 contains an outlook.

Proceedings of the 26th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1988

An analysis of English tense and aspect is presented that specifies temporal precedence relations within a sentence. The relevant reference points for interpretation are taken to be the initial and terminal points of events in the world, as well as two "hypothetical" times: the perfect time (when a sentence contains perfect aspect) and the progressive or during time. A method for providing temporal interpretation for nontensed elements in the sentence is also described.

2015

In this paper, we propose an annotation scheme for the manual annotation of tense and aspect in natural language corpora, as well as an implementation using GraphAnno, a configurable tool for manual multilevel annotation. The annotation scheme is based on Klein’s (1994) theory of tense and aspect, arguably the most widely accepted theory in this domain (cf. also Klein and Li 2009). One of the most important features of Klein’s theory is that in addition to the time span during which a situation obtains (the ‘time of situation’/TSit), it makes use of the concept of ‘Topic Time’ (TT), which is related to, but different from, Reichenbach’s (1947) reference point ‘R’ (cf. Derczynski and Gaizauskas 2013). Given that the resulting annotations cannot be mapped one-to-one to words or constituents, and as they are partially retrieved from the context, a semantic layer of annotation is needed, in addition to the structural one. The multi-level approach advocated here also allows us to annotat...

2010

Polysemy is a major characteristic of natural languages. Like words, syntactic forms can have several meanings. Understanding the correct meaning of a syntactic form is of great importance to many NLP applications. In this paper we address an important type of syntactic polysemy -the multiple possible senses of tense syntactic forms. We make our discussion concrete by introducing the task of Tense Sense Disambiguation (TSD): given a concrete tense syntactic form present in a sentence, select its appropriate sense among a set of possible senses. Using English grammar textbooks, we compiled a syntactic sense dictionary comprising common tense syntactic forms and semantic senses for each. We annotated thousands of BNC sentences using the defined senses. We describe a supervised TSD algorithm trained on these annotations, which outperforms a strong baseline for the task.

Proceedings of the 25th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics -, 1987

This paper gives an account of the role tense plays in the listener's reconstruction of the events and situations a speaker has chosen to describe. Several new ideas are presented: (a) that tense is better viewed by analogy with definite NPs than with pronouns; (b) that a narrative has a temporal focus that grounds the context-dependency of tense; and (c) that focus management heuristics can be used to track the movement of temporal focus. 1

2012

2. Early innovations: Reichenbach’s reference times, Davidson’s events.....................................................................2

1989

In this paper a model for temporal references in natural language (NL) is studied and a Prolog implementation of it is presented. This model is intended to be a common framework for semantic analysis of verb tenses and temporal adverbial phrases. The time model choosen was based on time intervals and temporal relations.

A highly desirable goal in grammatical description, considering the extraordinary diversity of natural languages, is the development of a consistent and robust system of conceptual tools and (if possible) terminological conventions, such that typological comparison may easily be pursued. This is even more the case in the domain of tense and aspect, notoriously haunted by a conspicuous variety of theoretical approaches. In this review-article, devoted to the discussion of three recent works, I would like to address the problem of how a grammatical description of tense and aspect structures should be conceived in order to make it interlinguistically useful. This would considerably improve the situation in our task of constructing a general typology of tense and aspect systems; a task that should best be tackled before too late, i. e. before most of the languages still spoken on this planet lose their speakers and remain frozen for ever at the status of written record. Since we are eng...

1978

Much of the recent work in linguistics has focused on the problem of giving a precise syntax for English. There is now an increasing awareness of the need for some kind of semantic theory. Some recent work of the logician Richard Montague has great promise in this regard. Montague's main goal was to give a completely successful analysis of logical consequence for ordinary language. He approached this end by giving such an analysis for what may be regarded as limited portions of English, or fragments of English. A fragment is a formal language in that it has a rigorous syntax and a model-theoretic semantics. The semantics provides a characterization of the notions of a true sentence (under a given interpretation) and of logical consequence. There are three papers by Montague where he presents such fragments: Montague [3], Montague [4], and Montague [6]. (Henceforth, we shall refer to these papers as EFL, UG, and PTQ, respectively.)

1996

Abstract In this paper back-and-forth structures are de ned and applied to the semantics of natural language. Back-and-forth structures consist of an event structure and an interval structure communicating via a relational link; transitions in the one structure correspond to transitions in the other. Such entities enable us to view temporal constructions (such as tense, aspect, and temporal connectives) as methods of moving systematically between information sources.