Computing the temporal structure of events in natural language
Mona Singh, Munindar P. Singh · 1992
. A key step in Natural Language Processing is creating representations of sentences and discourses. Sentences describe states and events. Thus a crucial component of semantically interpreting them is determining the temporal structure of the events they describe. We present a general and declarative approach to doing so. This approach is based on an algebraic semantics of events and objects. Keywords: situation type, aspect, events. 1 Introduction Recently, much work has been done on the temporal structure of events [1, 4, 6], a task crucial to constructing appropriate representations which, in turn, is a fundamental step in understanding and generating natural language. The structure of an event and its relationship to other events in a discourse depends on its situation type and aspect [1, 4]. For example, the sentences Al walked in the park and Al found a ball, which differ in situation type, result in different representations---the former introduces a temporally extended event ...