Labeling Documents with Timestamps: Learning from their Time Expressions

Temporal reasoners for document understanding typically assume that a document’s creation date is known. Algorithms to ground relative time expressions and order events often rely on this timestamp to assist the learner. Unfortunately, the timestamp is not always known, particularly on the Web. This paper addresses the task of automatic document timestamping, presenting two new models that incorporate rich linguistic features about time. The first is a discriminative classifier with new features extracted from the text’s time expressions (e.g., ‘since 1999’). This model alone improves on previous generative models by 77%. The second model learns probabilistic constraints between time expressions and the unknown document time. Imposing these learned constraints on the discriminative model further improves its accuracy. Finally, we present a new experiment design that facilitates easier comparison by future work.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Nathanael Chambers
• Keywords: ACL 2012, Computational Linguistics, Generative Models, Probabilistic Constraints, Time Expressions