Exploiting aspectual features and connecting words for summarization-inspired temporal-relation extraction

This paper presents a model that incorporates contemporary theories of tense and aspect and develops a new framework for extracting temporal relations between two sentence-internal events, given their tense, aspect, and a temporal connecting word relating the two events. A linguistic constraint on event combination has been implemented to detect incorrect parser analyses and potentially apply syntactic reanalysis or semantic reinterpretation—in preparation for subsequent processing for multi-document summarization. An important contribution of this work is the extension of two different existing theoretical frameworks—Hornstein’s 1990 theory of tense analysis and Allen’s 1984 theory on event ordering—and the combination of both into a unified system for representing and constraining combinations of different event types (points, closed intervals, and open-ended intervals). We show that our theoretical results have been verified in a large-scale corpus analysis. The framework is designed to inform a temporally motivated sentence-ordering module in an implemented multi-document summarization system.