Temporal Relations with Signals: The Case of Italian Temporal Prepositions

This paper presents a Maximum Entropy tagger for the identification of intra-sentential temporal relations between temporal expressions and eventualities mediated by temporal signals in constructions of the kind "eventuality + signal + temporal relation". The tagger reports an accuracy rate of 90.8%, outperforming the baseline (81.8%). One of the main results of this work is represented by the identification of a set of robust features which may be automatically obtained with a relative computational effort.