The reliable extraction of knowledge from text requires an appropriate treatment of the time at which reported events take place. Unfortunately, there are very few annotated data sets that support the development of techniques for event time-stamping and tracking the progression of time through a narrative. In this paper, we present a new corpus of temporally-rich documents sourced from English Wikipedia, which we have annotated with TIMEX2 tags. The corpus contains around 120000 tokens, and 2600 TIMEX2 expressions, thus comparing favourably in size to other existing corpora used in these areas. We describe the preparation of the corpus, and compare the profile of the data with other existing temporally annotated corpora. We also report the results obtained when we use DANTE, our temporal expression tagger, to process this corpus, and point to where further work is required. The corpus is publicly available for research purposes.
Pawel P. Mazur, Robert Dale