Introduction to the special issue on temporal information processing

Abstract

Time is a key dimension of our information space, with many applications standing to benefit from exploiting it. This special issue is devoted to temporal information processing for natural language as well as temporal reasoning. We begin by describing some of the ways time is expressed in natural language, and the particular requirements this imposes on information processing systems. We then provide an overview of current annotation-based approaches to temporal information extraction, followed by an introduction to the relevant literature on temporal reasoning. We also provide brief synopses of the articles in this issue, situating them in a broader context. We end with administrative remarks about the creation of this special issue.