Automatic resolution rule assignment to multilingual temporal expressions using annotated corpora

The knowledge-based system TERSEO was originally developed for the recognition and normalization of temporal expressions in Spanish and then extended to other languages: to English first, through the automatic translation of the temporal expressions, and then to Italian, applying a porting process where the automatic translation of the rules was combined with the extraction of expressions from an annotated corpus. In this paper we present a new automatic porting procedure, where resolution rules are automatically assigned to the temporal expressions that have been acquired in a new language, thus eliminating the need for automatic translation and consequently minimizing the errors produced. This is achieved by exploiting the rules of the temporal model, which are language independent, and the information extracted from the annotated corpus. Evaluation results of the updated version of TERSEO for English show a considerable improvement in recognition performance (+ 14% F-measure) with respect to the original system.