computer science

Temporal annotation

Temporal annotation is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Temporal annotation rather than just read about it. In short: Temporal annotation is the study of how to automatically add semantic information regarding time to natural language documents. It plays a role in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Key takeaways

Temporal annotation belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Temporal annotation to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Temporal annotation from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Temporal annotation is the study of how to automatically add semantic information regarding time to natural language documents. It plays a role in natural language processing and computational linguistics.

About Temporal annotation involves the application of a semantic annotation to a document. Significant temporal annotation standards include TimeML, ISO-TimeML and TIDES. These standards typically include annotations for some or all of temporal expressions (or timexes), events, temporal relations, temporal signals, and temporal relation types. In natural language texts, events may be associated with times; e.g., they may start or end at a given at a time. Events are also associated with other events, like occurring before or after them. We call these relations temporal relations. Temporal relation typing classifies the relation between two arguments, and is an important and difficult sub-task of figuring out all the temporal information in a document. Allen's interval algebra is one scheme for types of temporal relations. Rule-engineering and machine learning approaches to temporal annotation have both been successful, though achieving high performance in temporal relation typing remains a difficult task.

Applications Successful temporal annotation enables systems to find out when facts asserted in texts are true, to build timelines, to extract plans, and to discover mentions of change. This has had applications in many domains, such as information extraction, digital history, processing social media, and clinical text mining.

Evaluation The TempEval task series sets a shared temporal annotation task, and has run at SemEval three times, attracting system entries from around the world. The task originally centred on determining the types of temporal relations only. In TempEval-2 and -3, this expanded to include event and timex annotation. In addition, the i2b2 clinical evaluation shared task was a temporal annotation exercise in 2012, which attracted a great deal of interest.

See also Computational semantics Natural language processing SemEval TimeML

Further reading Boguraev, B. and Ando, R.K. (2005), TimeML-Compliant Text Analysis for Temporal Reasoning. Proceedings of IJCAI. Derczynski, L. (2013), Determining the Types of Temporal Relations in Discourse, PhD thesis, University of Sheffield. Pustejovsky et al. (2003), The TimeBank Corpus, Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference. Pustejovsky et al. (2005), The specification language TimeML, in 'The Language of Time'. ISBN 9780199268542. UzZaman, N. and Allen, J. (2010), Event and Temporal Expression extraction from raw text: first step towards a temporally aware system, International Journal of Semantic Computing 4(4).

References

External links TimeML.org Archived 2019-07-26 at the Wayback Machine THYME project Pheme project

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Temporal annotation

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Temporal annotation claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Temporal annotation before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Temporal annotation ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Temporal annotation

In research: Temporal annotation appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Temporal annotation in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Temporal annotation is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Computational linguistics, Lexical semantics, Natural language processing, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Temporal annotation outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Temporal annotation in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Temporal annotation means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Temporal annotation out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Temporal annotation in simple terms?

Why does Temporal annotation matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Temporal annotation?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Temporal annotation.