Temporal Relations Annotation and Extrapolation Based on Semi-intervals and Boundig Relations (2020)

Abstract: The computational treatment of temporal relations is based on the work of Allen, who establishes 13 different types, and Freksa, who designs a cognitive procedure to manage them. Freksa’s notation is not widely used because, although it has cognitive and expressive advantages, it is too complex from the computational perspective. This paper proposes a system for the annotation and management of temporal relations that combines the richness and expressiveness of Freksa’s approach with the simplicity of Allen’s notation. Our method is summarized in the application of bounding relations, thanks to which it is possible to obtain the temporary representation of complete neighborhoods capable of representing vague temporal relations such as those that can be frequently found in a text. Such advantages are obtained without the need to greatly increase the complexity of the labeling process since the markup language is almost the same as TimeML, to which only a second temporary “relType”’ type label relationship is added. Our experiments show that the temporal relationships that present vagueness are in fact much more common than those in which a single relationship can be established precisely. For these reasons, our new labeling system achieves a more agreeable representation of temporal relations.

## introduction the understanding of the sequence in a narrative is a fundamental aspect in the comprehension of a text. news, novels, stories, narratives and many other types of texts contain events that occur in a certain chronological order, whether they express time explicitly or implicitly. the reader needs to obtain the temporal notion of the events that occur within a text in order to understand what is being narrated. there has been a large number of investigations, mainly theoretical, for the use of temporal relations to establish a chain of reference points, consisting mainly of events anchored to a known point in time or another event. with the help of these chains, timelines can be arranged. this type of approach allows for an abstract representation of time that is similar to the way in which humans communicate, since they rely on relative expressions, often using as reference the moment of speech or creation of the document. temporal relations can be used similarly @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite . the identification of temporal relations between pairs of events or time intervals is a widely used way to express time. this type of annotation uses a set of realizations that has been designed as the core to classify and annotate each one of the relations of the entities of a text. the set of representations is very important for annotation and temporal reasoning. @xcite and @xcite have developed tools for the construction of these representations. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international license. license details: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ . knowing how to annotate temporal relations is necessary to deal with them. the annotation of temporally related events is absolutely dependent on the set of temporal relations that is used. allen and freksa are the authors of the most widespread theories on the topic. freksa's temporal neighborhoods are richer than allen's proposal in the representation of time, but also more complex (31 features vs. 13). therefore, allen's relations are usually preferred when labeling a corpus, although they can cause confusion when ambiguous temporal relations are presented in the texts @xcite . this work presents a variant in freksa's system of annotation and handling of temporal relations. the goal is to be as rich in the expressiveness of time as freksa's relations while keeping the simplicity of only using allen's system. the nucleus of the proposal is the ability to handle ambiguity in temporal relations thanks to the compatibility our system has with freksa's neighborhoods. section 2 shows the theory and sets of temporal relations of both allen and freksa, as well as the most important features of these systems our proposal is based on. in section 3, we analyze aspects regarding expressiveness of annotation systems. in section 4, we detail our proposal of bounding temporal relations. section 5 explains an example of the 'relabeling' of a corpus that was already annotated with allen's set of tags. in section 6, some results obtained with the 'relabeling' process are shown. the paper closes in section 7 with conclusions and future work. ## temporal relations time can be considered as a linear phenomenon. if there are two events or entities that can be assigned a temporary space, it is possible to give them an order or identify the relative position within a general timeline. if there are, for example, a pair of events a and b, we could order them as: a occurs before b, a occurs after b, a begins before b finishes, etc. the different ways in which events may be related are defined in a set of possibilities that form the different temporal relations. ## temporal relations compromise to work with temporal relations, some annotation system is needed to allow the connection of two events in a specific way. therefore, the set of temporal relations becomes very important since it delimits the quantity of labels. allen's set of relations includes 13 different labels, while freksa's suggests 31 categories to manage neighborhoods. having a smaller set of relations represents a great increase in the simplicity of labeling and processing. many works use a reduced set of labels -between four to sixand get good results @xcite @xcite @xcite . however, it also implies a loss of information. a bit more sophisticated is the annotation system of the 3rd tempeval, that uses the complete set of allen's relations. nonetheless, there are some modifications that should be considered, as @xcite report. @xcite describes the sets of temporal relations according to two dimensions which describe the range combinations that they are capable of capturing. the first one is expressiveness vs. simplicity, which refers to the range of different combinations that the system can capture, the simpler the system, the fewer combinations that can be expressed; and the second one, specificity vs. laxness, which refers to how constrained a time relation is once a label is assigned, or how much information is needed to be able to do the labeling without having to assume information. these dimensions are generally inversely proportional, since the more accurately a representation expresses a temporal relation, the more complex it is. also, when a representation can specify exactly the temporal relation between two events, the possibility of vagueness is lost. allen's temporal relations are richer than the simple ones (like the ones used on early versions of tem-peval) and provide more accurate information about the way events are temporally related. however, they are disadvantageous in that it is necessary to know both intervals completely in order to accurately establish any temporal relation. such specific knowledge is lost by inferring temporal relations from related ones (see the case of temporal algebra @xcite ) and difficult to find in general texts. derczynski (2016) introduces an example called the opera problem, that illustrates this phenomenon: given the statement irene went to the opera today, interval o is the visit to the opera and interval t is today. as shown in figure 3 , without knowing when irene left, one cannot choose a single interval relation out of: a) o is included in t ; b) o finishes t ; c) o overlaps t . in annotation systems, it is preferable to have a single temporal relation linking two events. nevertheless, when cases such as the opera problem arise, the annotators find themselves in a confusing situation. this problem is frequent in annotation systems such as timeml, that results in a reduced agreement between annotators. in the particular case of timeml, its inter-annotator agreement on relation types was 0.71 kappa among experts in this kind of annotation. @xcite experiments with several different types of representations of temporal relations, concluding that although a representation with greater expressiveness is preferable, a greater expressiveness in a representation of temporal relations is inversely proportional to the performance of a system that uses them. figure 3 : the opera problem: linguistic ambiguity leads to an inability to choose a single interval relation. here, the time of arrival at the opera is known, but not the departure, making it hard to relate intervals o and t . ## our proposal: bounding temporal relations we consider that allen's representation of temporal relations has as much expressiveness as possible, that is, we will not be able to find more specific temporal relations. in contrast, we find that the annotation of this kind of relations is deficient in laxness due to the constraint of being able to handle only an absolute specificity. on the other hand, the representation of freksa's temporal relations has a greater degree of laxness due to the possibility to deal with several possible temporal relations between a pair of events. despite this, its simplicity decreases considerably because of the many additional tags that the annotator needs to know in order to be able to correctly label the neighborhood (31 vs 13). we assume this is the reason why there are no corpora labeled with this kind of representation. as stated in the example of the opera problem (see figure 3 ), a lack of complete temporal information can result in an ambiguous temporal relation that different annotators will easily interpret differently. the objective of this paper is to propose a temporary representation that facilitates dealing with ambiguous temporal relations without greatly increasing the complexity of its annotation. that is to say, we seek to increase the laxness of allen's temporal relations without harming the specificity that it is able to capture, in other words, increase its expressiveness with a minimal decrease of simplicity. by studying all the neighborhoods suggested by @xcite , it was found that we could take advantage of the way that the relations turn out to be arranged within the neighborhoods. we claim it is possible to identify the relations that are delimited by the neighborhood boundaries. we found that for every neighborhood there is a pair of bounding relations that mark the extremes that encompass it and provide enough information to obtain the complete neighborhood; in other words, no pair of different neighborhoods has the same bounding relations. in order to get a correct management of temporal information by means of bounding relations, it is necessary to have a way to crowd the full temporal neighborhood from those bounding relations. therefore, a simple algorithm for filling freksa's neighborhoods is also proposed. given that the tagged, or otherwise automatically detected, bounding relations may not be compatible with any of the neighborhoods, the algorithm is responsible for generalizing rules to obtain a plausible one (even if it is not one of freksa's set) for any pair of given bounding relations. the procedure to find the neighborhood of relations uses a graph in which temporal relations are nodes connected with edges, as shown in figure 4 . starting from the pair of bounding relations nodes in this graph, it is possible to get the temporal neighborhood by calculating the union of the shortest paths between them. the image, despite being very similar to that of figure 2 , presents a couple of extra edges that are very important to obtain reliable neighborhoods for any case. with this, it is possible to obtain the freksa's neighborhoods that correspond in their extremes with the bounding relations. if a couple of relations without an equivalent in freksa's neighborhoods are found, the generalized rules will find a compatible neighborhood for the bounding relations. ## relabeling a time annotated corpus in order to test our claims, we organized a relabeling of a time annotated corpus with our new proposed method for temporal relation identification. in this section, we explain the details of the process of relabeling, as well as the results and insights we could observe. for the relabeling process, we worked over the timebank 1.2 corpus. this corpus has 183 news articles that have been annotated following the timeml 1.2.1 specification. the taggers were instructed in the possibility of representing vagueness in temporal relations and how to achieve this by identifying the bounding relations. with this information, the taggers were completely free to decide whether the text presented a specific relation, a vague relation, or no relation at all. we developed a gui system that reads the original annotated file relation by relation and asks the annotator for the pair of bounding relations. once the relabeling is done, the result is a file with the same format as the originally annotated corpus but with two labels for the temporal relation instead of one. the relabeling task was performed independently by two english speakers outside this research who were debriefed of the objectives of temporal annotations and the new method we are proposing, along with instructions for using as many temporal relations as they understood from the text. revenue gained 13% to @xmath068.5 million. ## results although the new relabeled corpus contains two temporal relations for every pair of related events, it is necessary to complete the temporal neighborhood from the pair of bounding relations in order to analyze the proposed method. for this, we developed a system that follows the procedure described in section 4.1 to get the full elements of the neighborhood expressed as a combination of allen's original set of relations. from the relabeling, a result that seems important to mention is the proportion of vagueness that the taggers found in the texts. that is, of all the original tlinks, how many of them were cataloged as a single well-defined temporary relation, and how many were perceived as a vague relation that could be interpreted as more than one temporary relation. on the one hand, one of the taggers found temporal relations present in 67.03% of the pairs linked by tlink, while the other tagger found temporal relations in 69.96% of the pairs of events. within those events that they considered with a temporal relation, the first tagger found that in 94.64% of cases the temporal relation could be interpreted in more than one way. for the second tagger, this proportion rose to 99.75% of the cases. this result reflects the ambiguity that is actually present in the temporary expression of events written in natural language. also, for previous temporary tagging methods, there is a vagueness that could not be represented. as an insight of the labels that were able to be accurately assigned to a single temporal relation, we find it interesting to highlight that 86.60% of the cases coincided with the equals relation. with the new temporary labeling system that we are proposing, the categories of temporal relation that may exist between pairs of events are no longer mutually exclusive. that is why the cohen's kappa coefficient for annotator agreement measurement cannot be applied. nevertheless, we can measure the agreement between taggers, taking into consideration the intersection that exists between neighborhoods that results from the tagged bounding relations. considering full neighborhoods, we note intersection exists between neighborhoods in 75.84% of the first tagger's cases, and in 79.15% of the second tagger's cases. in figure 6 , side by side, the general proportion from both taggers are shown: the internal ring on both sides shows the relation between temporarily related events (orange) versus not related events (blue). on the middle ring, we highlighted in yellow the proportion of events tagged as vague, and finally, the external ring shows in green the proportion of relations where we found intersection between the tags of the resulting neighborhoods. on the inner ring, related vs unrelated events. on the middle ring, detected vagueness is highlighted. on the outer ring, the agreement is shown. we consider a complete intersection when the pair of labels of two taggers match. this happens in 36.84% of the cases where intersection appears. however, we shall also consider that intersection is not limited to these cases since, although the pair of labels do not match, it is possible that some of its neighborhood nodes intersect. then, we name this kind of cases as partial intersection. on the re-tagged case, we found 63.16% of partial intersection of which 73.08% of the cases intersect in at least half of the nodes. that is another point that reinforces the importance of vagueness. figure 7 represents the total intersected tags, differentiating how many of them match completely versus how many of them do partially. in the latter case, we note how many of them match partially in at least half of their nodes. furthermore, to evaluate the new agreement between the labels and to have a better insight on the accuracy of the method and the vagueness and confusion of the temporal expressions in the texts, a dilation metric was executed. dilation is a useful tool to know how different the re-taggings were. as mentioned in section 4.1, our proposed method is the completion of a neighborhood from the bounding relations of the labeling. that said, if we take the labels of both taggers as bounding relations to make a global completion of the neighborhood, we can measure the discrepancy between the two labels by knowing the difference in the number of nodes that occur between the individual neighborhood and the neighborhood formed by both taggers together. this difference in the number of nodes is what we mean by dilation. ## conclusion and future work we have proposed a modification in the annotation and handling of temporal relations to find an efficient way to increase expressiveness and versatility with minimal increase in the complexity in the annotation. the adaptations this work suggests intend to improve the type of temporary relation that can be represented by the labels without increasing the complexity. the problem that the annotators have with ambiguous relations has already been exposed. however, not all temporal relations are confusing in the same way since those that are closer are those that are more often misinterpreted @xcite . by modifying the labeling system to allow the capture of such ambiguity, we seek to facilitate the uniformity of the labeling. at the moment, there is no record of any corpus of temporal relations tagged with freksa's neighborhood system, and we assume that the reason for this is the complexity that the labeling would carry. we seek to overcome this difficulty with this new system. as future work, it would be advisable to undertake the task of labeling or modifying the existing tagged corpora to obtain a training corpus with an expressiveness equivalent to freksa's temporal neighborhoods.