Question Answering Based on Temporal Inference

Contents

Answering questions that ask about temporal information involves several forms of inference. First, relations between events and temporal expressions need to be inferred, either in the question or in the answer. Second, semantic inference between events, entities and their definitions needs to be performed. Sometimes, semantic inference employs aspectual information to relate events expressed by different lexical units. Third, temporal inference is preconditioned by relations between events, or between events, their arguments and their time anchors. In this paper we present a Question Answering (QA) methodology for handling temporal inference by combining all these forms of inference.