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Spatiotemporal Annotation Using MiniSTEx: how to deal with Alternative, Foreign, Vague and/or Obsolete Names?

We are currently developing MiniSTEx, a spatiotemporal annotation system to handle temporal and/or geospatial information directly and indirectly expressed in texts. In the end the aim is to locate all eventualities in a text on a time axis and/or a map to ensure an optimal base for automatic temporal and geospatial reasoning. MiniSTEx was originally developed for Dutch, keeping in mind that it should also be useful for other European languages, and for multilingual applications. In order to meet these desiderata we need the MiniSTEx system to be able to draw the conclusions human readers would also draw, e.g. based on their (spatiotemporal) world knowledge, i.e. the common knowledge such readers share. Therefore, notions like “background knowledge”, “intended audience”, and “present-day user” play a major role in our approach. The world knowledge MiniSTEx uses is contained in interconnected tables in a database. At the moment it is used for Dutch and English. Special attention will be paid to the problems we face when looking at older texts or recent historical or encyclopedic texts, i.e. texts with lots of references to times and locations that are not compatible with our current maps and calendars.