Advances in temporal databases make it increasingly easier to store time-dependent information, creating a need for facilities that will help end-users access this information. In the context of natural language interaction, significant effort has been devoted to interfaces that allow database queries to be formulated in natural language. Most of the existing interfaces, however, do not support adequately the notion of time. Drawing upon tense and aspect theories, temporal logics, and temporal databases, this cross-discipline book examines relevant issues from the three areas, developing a unified theoretical framework that can be used to build natural language interfaces to temporal databases. The framework features an HPSG mapping from English to a formally defined meaning representation language, and a corresponding mapping to a temporal extension of the SQL database language. The book is accompanied by a freely available prototype interface, built according to the framework, and implemented using Prolog and ALE. This is the first in-depth exploration of the notion of time in natural language database interfaces. It will be particularly interesting to researchers working on natural language interaction, tense and aspect, HPSG, temporal logics, and temporal databases, especially those who wish to learn about time-related issues in other disciplines.

Advances in temporal databases make it increasingly easier to store time-dependent information, creating a need for facilities that will help end-users access this information. In the context of natural language interaction, significant effort has been devoted to interfaces that allow database queries to be formulated in natural language. Most of the existing interfaces, however, do not support adequately the notion of time. Drawing upon tense and aspect theories, temporal logics, and temporal databases, this cross-discipline book examines relevant issues from the three areas, developing a unified theoretical framework that can be used to build natural language interfaces to temporal databases. The framework features an HPSG mapping from English to a formally defined meaning representation language, and a corresponding mapping to a temporal extension of the SQL database language. The book is accompanied by a freely available prototype interface, built according to the framework, and implemented using Prolog and ALE. This is the first in-depth exploration of the notion of time in natural language database interfaces. It will be particularly interesting to researchers working on natural language interaction, tense and aspect, HPSG, temporal logics, and temporal databases, especially those who wish to learn about time-related issues in other disciplines.

Abstract: "Most existing natural language database interfaces (NLDBs) were designed to be used with database systems that provide very limited facilities for manipulating time-dependent data, and they do not support adequately temporal linguistic mechanisms (verb tenses, temporal adverbials, temporal subordinate clauses, etc.). The database community is becoming increasingly interested in temporal database systems, that are intended to store and manipulate in a principled manner information not only about the present, but also about the past and future. When interfacing to temporal databases, supporting temporal linguistic mechanisms become crucial. We present a framework for constructing natural language interfaces for temporal databases (NLTDBs), that draws on research in tense and aspect theories, temporal logics, and temporal databases. The framework consists of a temporal intermediate representation language, called TOP, an HPSG grammar that maps a wide range of questions involving temporal mechanisms to appropriate TOP expressions, and a provably correct method for translating from TOP to TSQL2, TSQL2 being a recently proposed temporal extension of the SQL database language. This framework was employed to implement a prototype NLTDB."

This reader collects and introduces important work in linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics on the use of linguistic devices in natural languages to situate events in time: whether they are past, present, or future; whether they are real or hypothetical; when an event might have occurred, and how long it could have lasted. In focussing on the treatment and retrieval of time-based information it seeks to lay the foundation for temporally-aware natural language computer processing systems, for example those that process documents on the worldwide web to answer questions or produce summaries. The development of such systems requires the application of technical knowledge from many different disciplines. The book is the first to bring these disciplines together, by means of classic and contemporary papers in four areas: tense, aspect, and event structure; temporal reasoning; the temporal structure of natural language discourse; and temporal annotation. Clear, self-contained editorial introductions to each area provide the necessary technical background for the non-specialist, explaining the underlying connections across disciplines. A wide range of students and professionals in academia and industry will value this book as an introduction and guide to a new and vital technology. The former include researchers, students, and teachers of natural language processing, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, computer science, information retrieval (including the growing speciality of question-answering), library sciences, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. Those in industry include corporate managers and researchers, software product developers, and engineers in information-intensive companies, such as on-line database and web-service providers.

This volume brings together revised versions of a selection of papers presented at the 2003 International Conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing”. A wide range of topics is covered in the volume: semantics, dialogue, summarization, anaphora resolution, shallow parsing, morphology, part-of-speech tagging, named entity, question answering, word sense disambiguation, information extraction. Various ‘state-of-the-art’ techniques are explored: finite state processing, machine learning (support vector machines, maximum entropy, decision trees, memory-based learning, inductive logic programming, transformation-based learning, perceptions), latent semantic analysis, constraint programming. The papers address different languages (Arabic, English, German, Slavic languages) and use different linguistic frameworks (HPSG, LFG, constraint-based DCG). This book will be of interest to those who work in computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, human language technology, translation studies, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and informatics.

This text covers the technologies of document retrieval, information extraction, and text categorization in a way which highlights commonalities in terms of both general principles and practical concerns. It assumes some mathematical background on the part of the reader, but the chapters typically begin with a non-mathematical account of the key issues. Current research topics are covered only to the extent that they are informing current applications; detailed coverage of longer term research and more theoretical treatments should be sought elsewhere. There are many pointers at the ends of the chapters that the reader can follow to explore the literature. However, the book does maintain a strong emphasis on evaluation in every chapter both in terms of methodology and the results of controlled experimentation.

This study integrates three independent subjects—translation theory, Mandarin aspect, and Greek aspect—for the purpose of formulating a working theory applicable to translating the Bible. The primary objectives are defined in terms of grammatical translation of Greek aspect into Mandarin aspect at the discourse level. A historical overview of the Chinese Bible is provided as a way of introducing major translation issues related to linguistic, conceptual, and logistical challenges. The proposed theory provides the translator with a powerful tool, which is tested in two sample passages from John 18–19 and 1 Corinthians 15. Provided, also, are critical reviews of over sixty Chinese Bible versions, Nestorian, Manichaean, Catholic documents, and a translation written according to the proposed theory.