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.