Building a corpus of temporal-causal structure

Steven Bethard, William Corvey, Sara Klingenstein, James H. Martin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

34 Scopus citations

Abstract

While recent corpus annotation efforts cover a wide variety of semantic structures, work on temporal and causal relations is still in its early stages. Annotation efforts have typically considered either temporal relations or causal relations, but not both, and no corpora currently exist that allow the relation between temporals and causals to be examined empirically. We have annotated a corpus of 1000 event pairs for both temporal and causal relations, focusing on a relatively frequent construction in which the events are conjoined by the word and. Temporal relations were annotated using an extension of the BEFORE and AFTER scheme used in the TempEval competition, and causal relations were annotated using a scheme based on connective phrases like and as a result. The annotators achieved 81.2% agreement on temporal relations and 77.8% agreement on causal relations. Analysis of the resulting corpus revealed some interesting findings, for example, that over 30% of CAUSAL relations do not have an underlying BEFORE relation. The corpus was also explored using machine learning methods, and while model performance exceeded all baselines, the results suggested that simple grammatical cues may be insufficient for identifying the more difficult temporal and causal relations.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages908-915
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)2951740840, 9782951740846
StatePublished - 2008
Externally publishedYes
Event6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008 - Marrakech, Morocco
Duration: May 28 2008May 30 2008

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008

Conference

Conference6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008
Country/TerritoryMorocco
CityMarrakech
Period5/28/085/30/08

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Education

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