The Temporal Structure of Narratives: A Semantic Approach
Mona Singh, Munindar P. Singh, W. Balcones · 1995
. Computing the temporal structure of narratives is an important milestone in understanding stories and discourses. We propose structured representations for events based on their algebraic properties. We use these representations along with the situation type and aspect of the predicates involved to give detailed semantic postulates for various temporal connectives. These postulates---more detailed than previously proposed---are developed in conjunction with an analysis of a story from the New York Times. This story was proposed as a challenge to NL systems. 1. Introduction Much research in Computational Linguistics has been recently focused on the structure of events and their semantic interpretation (Grasso et al., 1990; Moens and Steedman, 1988; Passonneau, 1988; Eberle and Kasper, 1989; Lascarides and Asher, 1993a; Kamp, 1991; Terenziani and Torasso, 1991). Determining the structure of events is a key prerequisite to solving the problem of constructing appropriate representations...