Learning Rich Event Representations and Interactions for Temporal Relation Classification

International audienceMost existing systems for identifying temporal relations between events heavily rely on hand-crafted features derived from event words and explicit temporal markers. Besides, less attention has been given to automatically learning con-textualized event representations or to finding complex interactions between events. This paper fills this gap in showing that a combination of rich event representations and interaction learning is essential to more accurate temporal relation classification. Specifically, we propose a method in which i) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) extract contextual information ii) character embeddings capture morpho-semantic features (e.g. tense, mood, aspect), and iii) a deep Convolutional Neu-ral Network (CNN) finds out intricate interactions between events. We show that the proposed approach outperforms most existing systems on the commonly used dataset while using fully automatic feature extraction and simple local inference