CogCompTime: A Tool for Understanding Time in Natural Language Text

TL;DR

CogCompTime is a publicly available system that advances the automatic extraction of explicit and implicit temporal information from text, supporting natural language understanding and time-aware applications.

Contribution

It introduces CogCompTime, a system integrating recent progress to achieve state-of-the-art performance in temporal information extraction from text.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art performance in temporal extraction tasks

Incorporates recent advances in temporal understanding

Publicly available for research and application use

Abstract

Automatic extraction of temporal information in text is an important component of natural language understanding. It involves two basic tasks: (1) Understanding time expressions that are mentioned explicitly in text (e.g., February 27, 1998 or tomorrow), and (2) Understanding temporal information that is conveyed implicitly via relations. In this paper, we introduce CogCompTime, a system that has these two important functionalities. It incorporates the most recent progress, achieves state-of-the-art performance, and is publicly available.1 We believe that this demo will be useful for multiple time-aware applications and provide valuable insight for future research in temporal understanding.