Representation and Learning of Temporal Relations

AbstractDetermining the relative order of events and times described in text is an important problem in natural language processing. It is also a difficult one: general state-of-the-art performance has been stuck at a relatively low ceiling for years. We investigate the representation of temporal relations, and empirically evaluate the effect that various temporal relation representations have on machine learning performance. While machine learning performance decreases with increased representational expressiveness, not all representation simplifications have equal impact.