TIDES—2003 Standard for
the Annotation of Temporal Expressions
January 2004
Lisa Ferro, The MITRE Corporation
Laurie Gerber, The MITRE Corporation
Inderjeet Mani, The MITRE Corporation
Beth Sundheim, The MITRE Corporation
George Wilson, The MITRE Corporation
ABSTRACT
During the 1990s, the field of computational linguistics achieved several practical advances through the construction of annotated corpora for developing and testing various technologies. This document describes a set of guidelines for annotating temporal expressions with a normalized representation of the times they denote. This work has been carried out in support of a number of research activities under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Translingual Information Detection, Extraction, and Summarization (TIDES) research program and the Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) program. Research which can directly benefit from this document includes question answering (e.g., answering "when" questions or time-dependent questions), relation and event characterization and tracking, visualization of events on timelines, and production of biographical summaries. Other research related to information extraction can also benefit.
This annotation standard specifies more details of semantic representation than the TIMEX recognition tasks used in past DARPA-sponsored evaluations (MUC7 1998), but are similar in that they treat the temporal expressions as stand-alone targets for annotation/extraction. These guidelines are intended to support a variety of downstream applications in the performance of some useful tasks; they are not intended to represent all the varieties of temporal information conveyed in natural language communication (the latter is a hopelessly ambitious goal, in our view). The guidelines are aimed at two sets of users:
- Human annotators about to embark on the annotation of temporal expressions in order to construct corpora consisting of temporally annotated data for use by the NL community.
- System developers who are building tagging programs to extract temporal information from documents.
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