Temporal Relations: Reference or Discourse Coherence?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how implicit temporal relations between events are understood, focusing on the influence of tense reference and discourse coherence constraints to improve the identification of these relations.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated approach combining tense referential properties and coherence constraints to better recover implicit temporal relations between events.

Findings

Enhanced understanding of implicit temporal relations

Effective integration of tense and coherence constraints

Improved methods for temporal relation identification

Abstract

The temporal relations that hold between events described by successive utterances are often left implicit or underspecified. We address the role of two phenomena with respect to the recovery of these relations: (1) the referential properties of tense, and (2) the role of temporal constraints imposed by coherence relations. We account for several facets of the identification of temporal relations through an integration of these.