A preliminary work on classifying time granularities of temporal questions

Wei Li, Wenjie Li, Qin Lu, Kam Fai Wong

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Temporal question classification assigns time granularities to temporal questions ac-cording to their anticipated answers. It is very important for answer extraction and verification in the literature of temporal question answering. Other than simply distinguishing between "date" and "period", a more fine-grained classification hierarchy scaling down from "millions of years" to "second" is proposed in this paper. Based on it, a SNoW-based classifier, combining user preference, word N-grams, granularity of time expressions, special patterns as well as event types, is built to choose appropriate time granularities for the ambiguous temporal questions, such as When- and How long-like questions. Evaluation on 194 such questions achieves 83.5% accuracy, almost close to manually tagging accuracy 86.2%. Experiments reveal that user preferences make significant contributions to time granularity classification.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Pages414-425
Number of pages12
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2005
Event2nd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, IJCNLP 2005 - Jeju Island, Korea, Republic of
Duration: 11 Oct 200513 Oct 2005

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume3651 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference2nd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, IJCNLP 2005
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CityJeju Island
Period11/10/0513/10/05

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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