A System for Extraction of Temporal Expressions from French Texts
Nikolai Vazov · 2001
Introduction The identification and the interpretation of temporal and aspectual information plays an important role in text understanding. This information is encoded in the natural languages by a wide array of linguistic means ranging from grammatical (morpho-syntactic) to lexical (verbs and adverbials) or strictly syntactic phenomena (temporal anaphora (Webber1988) or argument structure of the verb (Verkuyl1993)). In this paper we present a system for identification of lexical non-verbal means of expressing temporal information in French texts. Such means are the temporal adverbs (e.g. yesterday) and adverbials (e.g. three days before the marriage of his youngest son) studied in detail in (Bras and Molines1993; Gagnon and Lapalme1996), as well as the temporal subordinate clauses (e.g. When Peter arrived, ...) . The identification of these temporal expressions is based on a context-scanning strategy (CSS) (Charolles1997; Descl