Local Semantics in the Interpretation of Temporal Expressions

Work on the interpretation of temporal expressions in text has generally been pursued in one of two paradigms: the formal semantics approach, where an attempt is made to provide a well-grounded theoretical basis for the interpretation of these expressions, and the more pragmatically-focused approach represented by the development of the TIMEX2 standard, with its origins in work in information extraction. The former emphasises formal elegance and consistency; the latter emphasises broad coverage for practical applications. In this paper, we report on the development of a framework that attempts to integrate insights from both perspectives, with the aim of achieving broad coverage of the domain in a well-grounded manner from a formal perspective. We focus in particular on the development of a compact notation for representing the semantics of underspecified temporal expressions that can be used to provide component-level evaluation of systems that interpret such expressions.