An Annotation Scheme for Reichenbach's Verbal Tense Structure
This work addresses a domain-specific problem in natural language processing for automated tense processing, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theoretical frameworks without broad SOTA impact.
The paper tackles the problem of insufficiently capturing verbal tense richness in existing temporal annotation schemata by introducing RTMML, a markup language based on Reichenbach's analysis, which enables precise reasoning and deduction of temporal relations in documents.
In this paper we present RTMML, a markup language for the tenses of verbs and temporal relations between verbs. There is a richness to tense in language that is not fully captured by existing temporal annotation schemata. Following Reichenbach we present an analysis of tense in terms of abstract time points, with the aim of supporting automated processing of tense and temporal relations in language. This allows for precise reasoning about tense in documents, and the deduction of temporal relations between the times and verbal events in a discourse. We define the syntax of RTMML, and demonstrate the markup in a range of situations.