CogCompTime: A Tool for Understanding Time in Natural Language Text
This tool addresses the need for time-aware applications in natural language understanding, though it appears incremental as it builds on recent progress.
The paper tackles the problem of automatically extracting temporal information from natural language text, including explicit time expressions and implicit temporal relations, by introducing CogCompTime, a system that achieves state-of-the-art performance and is publicly available.
Automatic extraction of temporal information in text is an important component of natural language understanding. It involves two basic tasks: (1) Understanding time expressions that are mentioned explicitly in text (e.g., February 27, 1998 or tomorrow), and (2) Understanding temporal information that is conveyed implicitly via relations. In this paper, we introduce CogCompTime, a system that has these two important functionalities. It incorporates the most recent progress, achieves state-of-the-art performance, and is publicly available.1 We believe that this demo will be useful for multiple time-aware applications and provide valuable insight for future research in temporal understanding.