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French Resources for Extraction and Normalization of Temporal Expressions with HeidelTime

In this paper, we describe the development of French resources for the extraction and normalization of temporal expressions with HeidelTime, a open-source multilingual, cross-domain temporal tagger. HeidelTime extracts temporal expressions from documents and normalizes them according to the TIMEX3 annotation standard. Several types of temporal expressions are extracted: dates, times, durations and temporal sets. French resources have been evaluated in two different ways: on the French TimeBank corpus, a corpus of newspaper articles in French annotated according to the ISO-TimeML standard, and on a user application for automatic building of event timelines. Results on the French TimeBank are quite satisfaying as they are comparable to those obtained by HeidelTime in English and Spanish on newswire articles. Concerning the user application, we used two temporal taggers for the preprocessing of the corpus in order to compare their performance and results show that the performances of our application on French documents are better with HeidelTime. The French resources and evaluation scripts are publicly available with HeidelTime.