Toward automatic Chinese temporal information extraction

Over the past few years, temporal information processing and temporal database management have increasingly become hot topics. Nevertheless, only a few researchers have investigated these areas in the Chinese language. This lays down the objective of our research: to exploit Chinese language processing techniques for temporal information extraction and concept reasoning. In this article, we first study the mechanism for expressing time in Chinese. On the basis of the study, we then design a general frame structure for maintaining the extracted temporal concepts and propose a system for extracting time-dependent information from Hong Kong financial news. In the system, temporal knowledge is represented by different types of temporal concepts (TTC) and different temporal relations, including absolute and relative relations, which are used to correlate between action times and reference times. In analyzing a sentence, the algorithm first determines the situation related to the verb. This in turn will identi fy the type of temporal concept associated with the verb. After that, the relevant temporal information is extracted and the temporal relations are derived. These relations link relevant concept frames together in chronological order, which in turn provide the knowledge to fulfill users' queries, e.g., for question-answering (i.e., Q&A) applications.