TimeML
TimeML is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. It is defined in the TimeML Specification version 1.2.1 developed by several efforts, led in large part by the Laboratory for Linguistics and Computation at Brandeis University.
The TimeML project's goal is to create a standard markup language for temporal events in a document. TimeML addresses four problems regarding event markup, including time stamping, ordering events with respect to one another, reasoning with contextually underspecified temporal expressions, and reasoning about the length of events and their outcomes.
History
TimeML was conceptualized in 2002 during the TERQAS workshops, organized by Professor James Pustejovsky of Brandeis University. The TERQAS Workshops set out to address the problem of how to enhance natural language question answering systems to answer temporally-based questions about the events and entities in news articles. During these workshops, TimeML version 1.0 was defined, and the TimeBank corpus was created as an illustration.In 2003, the TANGO workshops produced a graphical annotation tool for TimeML.
The TARSQI project currently develops algorithms that tag events and time expressions in natural language texts, anchor them temporally, and order them.
Versions
According to the official TimeML website, there are currently three versions of the TimeML specification language, although it is rumored that other versions exist.Version 1.1
TimeML version 1.1 was produced in 2004.Version 1.2
TimeML version 1.2 was produced in 2004, shortly after the release of version 1.1.Version 1.2.1
In 2005, version 1.2.1 was defined. There were several changes made to the language, and are described in the version 1.2.1 TimeML guideline as such:- The attribute that was part of MAKEINSTANCE has been changed to pos, and the PRESPART, PASTPART, and INFINITIVE elements of redistributed to tense.
- The optional syntax attribute was added to SLINK, ALINK, and TLINK. Syntax can be used to hold CDATA, but is generally only used by annotation programs to hold the data that led to the creation of the tag.
- The optional comment attribute was added to all TimeML elements, for the purpose of giving annotators a place to put observations about annotated text.
ISO-TimeML
Work group members
- James Pustejovsky of Brandeis University
- Rob Gaizauskas
- Graham Katz
- Bob Ingria
- Jose Castaño
- Roser Saurí
- Anna Rumshisky
- Inderjeet Mani
- Antonio Sanfilippo
- Dragomir Radev
- Patrick Hanks
- Marc Verhagen
- Beth Sundheim
- Andrea Setzer
- Frank Schilder
- Jerry Hobbs
TimeML tags
TIMEML
The TIMEML tag is similar to the root tag in an XML document. It declares that the rest of the document surrounded by the TIMEML tag is encoded with TimeML tags.EVENT
The EVENT tag is used to annotate those elements in a text that mark the semantic events described by it. Syntactically, EVENTs are typically verbs, although event nominals, such as "crash" in "...killed by the crash", will also be annotated as EVENTs. The EVENT tag is also used to annotate a subset of the states in a document. This subset of states includes those that are either transient or explicitly marked as participating in a temporal relation. See the TimeML annotation guidelines for more details.TIMEX3
The TIMEX3 tag is primarily used to mark up explicit temporal expressions, such as times, dates, durations, etc. It is modeled on Setzer's TIMEX tag, as well as the TIDES TIMEX2 tag. Since it differs both in attribute structure and in use, it seemed best to give it a separate name, which reveals its heritage while at the same time indicating that it is different from its forebears.SIGNAL
The SIGNAL tag represents a temporal signal. These are any functionwords that suggest a particular temporal relationship. Example SIGNALs are: when, in, after.