Evaluating Information Loss in Temporal Dependency Trees

Mustafa Ocal, Mark Finlayson


Abstract
Temporal Dependency Trees (TDTs) have emerged as an alternative to full temporal graphs for representing the temporal structure of texts, with a key advantage being that TDTs can be straightforwardly computed using adapted dependency parsers. Relative to temporal graphs, the tree form of TDTs naturally omits some fraction of temporal relationships, which intuitively should decrease the amount of temporal information available, potentially increasing temporal indeterminacy of the global ordering. We demonstrate a new method for quantifying this indeterminacy that relies on solving temporal constraint problems to extract timelines, and show that TDTs result in up to a 109% increase in temporal indeterminacy over their corresponding temporal graphs for the three corpora we examine. On average, the increase in indeterminacy is 32%, and we show that this increase is a result of the TDT representation eliminating on average only 2.4% of total temporal relations. This result suggests that small differences can have big effects in temporal graphs, and the use of TDTs must be balanced against their deficiencies, with tasks requiring an accurate global temporal ordering potentially calling for use of the full temporal graph
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.263
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2148–2156
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.263
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mustafa Ocal and Mark Finlayson. 2020. Evaluating Information Loss in Temporal Dependency Trees. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2148–2156, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Information Loss in Temporal Dependency Trees (Ocal & Finlayson, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.263.pdf