Hua Zhong


2008

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Annotating “tense” in a Tense-less Language
Nianwen Xue | Hua Zhong | Kai-Yun Chen
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)

In the context of Natural Language Processing, annotation is about recovering implicit information that is useful for natural language applications. In this paper we describe a “tense” annotation task for Chinese - a language that does not have grammatical tense - that is designed to infer the temporal location of a situation in relation to the temporal deixis, the moment of speech. If successful, this would be a highly rewarding endeavor as it has application in many natural language systems. Our preliminary experiments show that while this is a very challenging annotation task for which high annotation consistency is very difficult but not impossible to achieve. We show that guidelines that provide a conceptually intuitive framework will be crucial to the success of this annotation effort.