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<Paper uid="P06-4009">
  <Title>Sydney, July 2006. c(c)2006 Association for Computational Linguistics An Intermediate Representation for the Interpretation of Temporal Expressions</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we are concerned with the interpretation of temporal expressions in text: that is, given an occurrence in a text of an expression like that marked in italics in the following example, we want to determine what point in time is referred to by that expression.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> (1) We agreed that we would meet at 3pm on the first Tuesday in November.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> In this particular case, we need to make use of the context of utterance to determine which November is being referred to; this might be derived on the basis of the date stamp of the document containing this sentence. Then we need to compute the full time and date the expression corresponds to.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> If the utterance in (1) was produced, say, in July 2006, then we might expect the interpretation to be equivalent to the ISO-format expression 2006-1107T15:00.1 The derivation of such interpretation was the focus of the TERN evaluations held under the ACE program. Several teams have developed systems which attempt to interpret both simple and much more complex temporal expressions; however, there is very little literature that describes in any detail the approaches taken. This may be due to a perception that such expressions are relatively easy to identify and interpret using simple patterns, but a detailed analysis of the range of temporal expressions that are covered by the TIDES annotation guidelines demonstrates that this is not the case. In fact, the proper treatment of some temporal expressions requires semantic and pragmatic processing that is considerably beyond the state of the art.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Our view is that it is important to keep in mind a clear distinction between, on the one hand, the conceptual model of temporal entities that a particular approach adopts; and, on the other hand, the specific implementation of that model that might be developed for a particular purpose. In this paper, we describe both our underlying framework, and an implementation of that framework. We believe the framework provides a basis for further development, being independent of any particular implementation, and able to underpin many different implementations. By clearly separating the underlying model and its implementation, this also opens the door to clearer comparisons between different approaches.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> We begin by summarising existing work in the area in Section 2; then, in Section 3, we describe our underlying model; in Section 4, we describe how this model is implemented in the DANTE 1Clearly, other aspects of the document context might suggest a different year is intended; and we might also add the time zone to this value.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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