Annotating “tense” in a Tense-less Language

Abstract

In the context of Natural Language Processing, annotation is about recovering implicit information that is useful for natural language applications. In this paper we describe a “tense” annotation task for Chinese - a language that does not have grammatical tense - that is designed to infer the temporal location of a situation in relation to the temporal deixis, the moment of speech. If successful, this would be a highly rewarding endeavor as it has application in many natural language systems. Our preliminary experiments show that while this is a very challenging annotation task for which high annotation consistency is very difficult but not impossible to achieve. We show that guidelines that provide a conceptually intuitive framework will be crucial to the success of this annotation effort.

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