TimeML: Robust specification of event and temporal expressions in text

In this paper we provide a description of TimeML, a rich specification language for event and temporal expressions in natural language text, developed in the context of the AQUAINT program on Question Answering Systems. Un-like most previous work on event annotation, TimeML cap-tures three distinct phenomena in temporal markup: (1) it systematically anchors event predicates to a broad range of temporally denotating expressions; (2) it orders event expres-sions in text relative to one another, both intrasententially and in discourse; and (3) it allows for a delayed (underspecified) interpretation of partially determined temporal expressions. We demonstrate the expressiveness of TimeML for a broad range of syntactic and semantic contexts, including aspectual predication, modal subordination, and an initial treatment of lexical and constructional causation in text