28 November: DCLRS -- David Woods, Friday, November 29, 16:00 (TCD Lloyd Builing
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of November 2019 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2019 | Full index
room 04 of the Lloyd Building (TCD), David Woods will speak.
Title:
Timelines from Text: Finding Event Order and Relations in Narratives
Abstract:
A narrative may mention any number of events, and we can intuitively
organise them in our heads based on the tense and aspect of the verbs
used (_he had walked_, _she is singing_, _they will travel_), relative
adverbials (_yesterday_, _at the moment_, _next year_), explicit
reference points (_at 6pm on Tuesday the 5th of November 2019_), and
other textual cues. If event A happened before event B, and B happened
before event C, then A also happened before C. However, natural language
understanding systems often have a poorer comprehension of the nuances
in the relations between events in text, particularly when there are
ambiguities or large numbers of events.
This talk will discuss a representation for times and events which will
allow for this task to be done automatically, as well as methods for
extracting the temporal information from a text and creating a linear
order over it (i.e. a timeline), using Allen's (1983) interval algebra
to create strings of events. The strings are basic computational
entities which are amenable to finite-state methods of reasoning, and
are intuitive to read. Using projections and alphabets of varying
granularities, any number of times and events can be handled.
Non-determinism allows for ambiguity.
Applications include the likes of automatic summarisation, fact-checking
tools, query-answering systems, annotation assistance tools, and others.
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The Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar series, hosted
this year by the Trinity Centre for Computing and Language Studies, is
a cooperation among Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University,
University College Dublin and the Technological University of Dublin,
a long standing collaboration which overlaps with the SFI CNGL/ADAPT
centres.
www.scss.tcd.ie/disciplines/intelligent_systems/clg/clg_web/DCLRS
Trinity Centre for Computing and Language Studies
www.scss.tcd.ie/CCLS
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of November 2019 | Index of year: 2019 | Full index