Resources for Calendar Expressions Semantic Tagging and Temporal Navigation through Texts

Abstract : The linguistic resources presented in this paper are designed for the recognition and semantic tagging of calendar expressions in French. While existing resources generally put the emphasis on describing calendar bases pointed out by calendar expressions (which are considered as named entities), our approach tries to explicit how references to calendar are linguistically built up, taking into account not only the calendar bases but as well the prepositions and units that operate on them, as they provide valuable information on how texts refer to the calendar. The modelling of these expressions led us to consider calendar expressions as a conjunction of operators interacting with temporal references. Though the resources aim to be generic and easily reusable, we illustrate the interest of our approach by using the resources output to feed a text navigation tool that is currently being improved, in order to offer users a way of temporally progressing or navigating in texts.