Processing and Representing Temporally Sequential Events
Ki Yong Lee · Waseda University Repository (Waseda University) · 2004
In a discourse, events are narrated one by one linearly. But the temporal sequence of events does not always match the linear sequence of narration. One of such cases involves the mixed occurrences of durative and punctual events, as illustrated by “Mia took aspirin and slept, for she was ill. She then fell off a cliff in her dream. " In this narration, five events are reported: three are durative events of sleeping, being ill and having a dream and two are punctual events of taking aspirin and falling off a cliff. This presentation aims at establishing some systematic way of processing such events and representing them in a reasonably understandable temporal sequence. For this, events are analyzed in terms of a temporal semantics that allows them to be anchored to appropriate temporal intervals and be ordered in an appropriate temporal sequence. In order to provide a simple syntactic basis, the presentation attempts to develop a small computational program that derive representations in feature structure by analyzing a small fragment of Korean. 1