A Heuristic Approach to Order Events in Narrative Texts

Abstract

We describe a heuristic method to order the events evoked in texts describing road accidents. The method consists first in generating, by non monotonic inference rules, a set of precedence and simultaneity constraints between temporal references linked to particular words of the text. Then, the proposed algorithm updates the narration order of the events to satisfy these constraints and give the real order of the events described in this text. The temporal information is represented according to a linear temporal model which is enhanced in a first order reified language.