XRCE-T: XIP Temporal Module for TempEval Campaign
Caroline Hagège, Xavier Tannier · 2007
We present the system we used for the TempEval competition. This system relies on a deep syntactic analyzer that has been extended for the treatment of temporal expressions. So, together with the temporal treatment needed for TempEval purposes, further syntactico-semantic information is also calculated, making thus temporal processing a complement for a better general purpose text understanding system. 1 General presentation and system overview Although interest in temporal and aspectual phenomena is not new in NLP and IA, temporal processing of real texts is a topic that has been of growing interest in the last years (Mani et al. 2005). The usefulness of temporal information became clear for a wide range of applications like multidocument summarization and question/answering systems (see for instance (Schilder et al. 2003)). For this reason, temporal taggers and annotated resources such as TimeBank (Pustejovsky et al., 2003) have been developed recently. The work we perform concerning temporal processing of texts is part of a more general process in text understanding. Temporal processing is integrated into a more generic tool, XIP, which is a general purpose linguistic analyzer (Aït et al., 2002). Temporal analysis is thus intertwined with syntactico-semantic text processing including deep syntactic analysis and determination of thematic