Workshop scope and aims

The ability to identify and analyse temporal information is important for a variety of natural language applications, such as information extraction, question answering, and multi-document summarisation. Nevertheless, this area of research has been relatively unexplored. It became evident during an ACL 2001 workshop on temporal and spatial information processing that that some research institutions have started to work on different aspects of temporal information, but no consensus has been achieved yet on what and how temporal information should be identified in text.

This workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers to present their work in this field and to discuss future developments such as building shared resources e.g. temporally annotated corpora. It is timely to coordinate the effort being undertaken in the community at this stage of research into temporal information in text.

Topics of interest include:

• How are times referred to in text?
• How are events temporally positioned?
• How are events related to each other?
• What is the relative role of tense/aspect vs. explicit time references?
• What is the chronological structure of different types of text (for example scientific reports vs. fiction vs. newswire texts)?
• Resolution of deictic/partial/vague/relative time expressions;
• Graphical representations of the temporal order of events;
• Ontologies for temporal information, e.g. times and events;
• Reasoning with/about temporal information;
• Proposals for annotating temporal information and identifying appropriate corpora;
• Evaluation of metrics for temporal annotation and evaluation of temporal annotation schemes;
• Tools for annotation.

Application areas include:

• Information extraction;
• Question answering;
• Planning;
• Multi-document summarisation.

Authors whose work is directed at annotation schemes are encouraged to address (in their full paper) the example texts provided at http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~andrea/lrec2002/exampleTexts.html.- this is not obligatory.

Workshop agenda

The full-day workshop will consist of paper presentations, a panel session, and an open discussion session to discuss future development and plans for possible collaborations.

Organisers

Program committee

Important dates

Submission

Abstracts for workshop contributions should not exceed two A4 pages (excluding references). An additional title page should state: the title; author(s); affiliation(s); and contact author's e-mail address, as well as postal address, telephone and fax numbers.

Submission is to be sent by email, preferably in Postscript or PDF format, to Andrea Setzer (andrea@dcs.shef.ac.uk) by the 18th February 2002.

Formatting instructions for the final full version of papers will be sent to authors after notification of acceptance.

Workshop Registration Fees

• If you are not attending LREC: 140 Euro
• If you are attending LREC: 90 Euro

Registration will be handled by the LREC Secretariat. All attendees will receive a copy of the workshop proceedings.