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An Empirical Approach to a Preliminary Successful Identification and Resolution of Temporal Expressions in Spanish News Corpora

Dating of contents is relevant to multiple advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, such as Information Retrieval or Question Answering. These could be improved by using techniques that consider a temporal dimension in their processes. To achieve it, an accurate detection of temporal expressions in data sources must be firstly done, dealing with them in an appropriated standard format that captures the time value of the expressions once resolved, and allows reasoning without ambiguity, in order to increase the range of search and the quality of the results to be returned. These tasks are completely necessary for NLP applications if an efficient temporal reasoning is afterwards expected. This work presents a typology of time expressions based on an empirical inductive approach, both from a structural perspective and from the point of view of their resolution. Furthermore, a method for the automatic recognition and resolution of temporal expressions in Spanish contents is provided, obtaining promising results when it is tested by means of an evaluation corpus.