Supporting temporal question answering: Strategies for offline data collection
David Ahn, Steven Schockaert, Martine De Cock, Etienne E. Kerre · Ghent University Academic Bibliography (Ghent University) · 2006
We pursue two strategies for offline data collection for a temporal question answering system that uses both quantitative methods and fuzzy methods to reason about time and events. The first strategy extracts event descriptions from the structured year entries in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, yielding clean quantitative temporal information about a range of events. The second strategy mines the web using patterns indicating temporal relations between events and times and between events. Web mining leverages the volume of data available on the web to find qualitative temporal relations between known events and new, related events and to build fuzzy time spans for events for which we lack crisp metric temporal information.