Title :
A framework for modeling and representing temporal discourse structure
Author :
Wong, Shuk Man ; Li, Wenjie ; Wong, Kam-Fai
Author_Institution :
Hong Kong Polytech. Univ., China
fDate :
30 Oct.-1 Nov. 2005
Abstract :
In this paper, we present a framework for modeling temporal reference in Chinese discourse. It generates the temporal relations (i.e. "before", "after" and "same-as") among the sentences by applying inference rules on a set of pre-specified linguistic features, including discourse features, such as theme, rhetorical relation as well as temporal features, such as tense/aspect markers and connectives. They are designed to determine time orientation or estimate the extent of time shift. A variety of experiments are conducted to compare the different impacts of these features on temporal reference determination and show that theme is the most significant one. The overall performance is promising and achieves 91.33% of accuracy on news articles. Meanwhile, we obtain the insight that the default forward movement of temporal reference, which is employed in previous researches, is not applicable to all genres of texts. In addition, we develop a graphic representation, namely temporal discourse map, which helps locating temporal references in a discourse.
Keywords :
computational linguistics; grammars; natural languages; temporal reasoning; text analysis; Chinese discourse; discourse feature; graphical representation; inference rule; linguistic feature; temporal discourse map; temporal discourse structure modeling framework; temporal discourse structure representation framework; temporal feature; temporal reference determination; Graphics; Ontologies; Research and development management; Speech; Systems engineering and theory; Visualization;
Conference_Titel :
Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Engineering, 2005. IEEE NLP-KE '05. Proceedings of 2005 IEEE International Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-9361-9
DOI :
10.1109/NLPKE.2005.1598737