Automatically Time Stamping Events in Unrestricted Text

This proposal addresses the design and development of a prototype application for extracting events with associated temporal information and allowing them to be visualized in a third-party Temporal Analysis application. The system will enable time stamping of events; this in turn enables sophisticated visualization of information on timelines. Advanced temporal reasoning, including tracking of reference time shifts will be pursued. The Phase 2 effort will focus on enhanced capability of the temporal model, as well as integration into an existing information extraction engine. Exact information about the date and time of an event is often not available from the text. However, it is usually possible for human readers to construct a partial order of events, and this is sufficient to understand the text. A key goal of this project is to support the processing of event information from texts even when only ordering information is available from the sources.