Extracting narrative timelines as temporal dependency structures

Oleksandr Kolomiyets, Steven Bethard, Marie Francine Moens

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

44 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose a new approach to characterizing the timeline of a text: Temporal dependency structures, where all the events of a narrative are linked via partial ordering relations like BEFORE, AFTER, OVERLAP and IDENTITY. We annotate a corpus of children's stories with temporal dependency trees, achieving agreement (Krippendorff's Alpha) of 0.856 on the event words, 0.822 on the links between events, and of 0.700 on the ordering relation labels. We compare two parsing models for temporal dependency structures, and show that a deterministic non-projective dependency parser outperforms a graph-based maximum spanning tree parser, achieving labeled attachment accuracy of 0.647 and labeled tree edit distance of 0.596. Our analysis of the dependency parser errors gives some insights into future research directions.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2012 - Proceedings of the Conference
Pages88-97
Number of pages10
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2012 - Jeju Island, Korea, Republic of
Duration: Jul 8 2012Jul 14 2012

Publication series

Name50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2012 - Proceedings of the Conference
Volume1

Conference

Conference50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2012
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CityJeju Island
Period7/8/127/14/12

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Software

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