TERQAS

Time and Event Recognition for Question Answering Systems

An ARDA Workshop on Advanced Question Answering Technology

January - July, 2002
James Pustejovsky, Organizer

The purpose of this workshop is to address the problem of how to enhance natural language question answering systems to answer temporally-based questions about the events and entities in news articles. The two goals of this workshop are: (1) to examine how to formally distinguish events and their temporal anchoring in text (news articles); and (2) to evaluate and develop algorithms for identifying and extracting events and temporal expressions from texts.

A specification language for events and temporal expressions will be defined and developed as a deliverable of the workshop. Once the initial definition and specification is complete, work will begin on annotation on a large number of news articles, in order to create a Temporal Gold Standard (TIMEBANK). Finally, the workshop will evaluate existing temporal extraction algorithms, and adapt and extend their functionality and coverage to meet the standard being defined.

Important Workshop Dates

Workshop Kick-off Meeting January 30-31, 2002
1 Week Session March 11-15, 2002
1 Week Session April 22-26, 2002
Mid-term Review June 7, 2002
2 Week Session June 10-21, 2002
Final 1 Week Session July 15-19, 2002
Workshop Final Presentation July 22-23, 2002

MITRE Organizers

Mark Maybury Email: maybury@mitre.org
Beverly Nunan Email: bnunan@mitre.org
David Day Email: day@mitre.org