I still have Time(s): Extending HeidelTime for German Texts

TL;DR

This paper introduces HeidelTime-EXT, an extension to the HeidelTime tool for German texts, improving temporal expression detection by addressing false negatives and enhancing coverage.

Contribution

The paper presents HeidelTime-EXT, a novel extension for German temporal expression detection, developed through analysis of false negatives and evaluated across multiple text genres.

Findings

Coverage increased by 2.7% to 8.5%.

Extension effectively reduces false negatives.

Available at https://github.com/texttechnologylab/heideltime.

Abstract

HeidelTime is one of the most widespread and successful tools for detecting temporal expressions in texts. Since HeidelTime's pattern matching system is based on regular expression, it can be extended in a convenient way. We present such an extension for the German resources of HeidelTime: HeidelTime-EXT . The extension has been brought about by means of observing false negatives within real world texts and various time banks. The gain in coverage is 2.7% or 8.5%, depending on the admitted degree of potential overgeneralization. We describe the development of HeidelTime-EXT, its evaluation on text samples from various genres, and share some linguistic observations. HeidelTime ext can be obtained from https://github.com/texttechnologylab/heideltime.