TimeML

TimeML is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically. It is defined in the TimeML Specification version 1.2.1 developed by several efforts, lead in large part by the Laboratory for Linguistics and Computation at Brandeis University.

The TimeML project's goal is to create a standard markup language for temporal events in a document. TimeML addresses four problems regarding event markup, including time stamping (with which an event is anchored to a time), ordering events with respect to one another, reasoning with contextually underspecified temporal expressions, and reasoning about the length of events and their outcomes.

TimeML was conceptualized in 2002 during the TERQAS (Time and Event Recognition for Question Answering Systems) workshops, organized by Professor James Pustejovsky of Brandeis University. The TERQAS Workshops set out to address the problem of how to enhance natural language question answering systems to answer temporally-based questions about the events and entities in news articles. During these workshops, TimeML version 1.0 was defined, and the TimeBank corpus was created as an illustration.

In 2003, the TANGO (TimeML Annotation Graphical Organizer) workshops produced a graphical annotation tool for TimeML.

The TARSQI (Temporal Awareness and Reasoning Systems for Question Interpretation) project currently develops algorithms that tag events and time expressions in natural language texts, anchor them temporally, and order them.

According to the official TimeML website, there are currently three versions of the TimeML specification language, although it is rumored that other versions exist.

TimeML version 1.1 was produced in 2004.

TimeML version 1.2 was produced in 2004, shortly after the release of version 1.1.

In 2005, version 1.2.1 was defined. There were several changes made to the language, and are described in the version 1.2.1 TimeML guideline as such:

ISO-TimeML was presented to the ISO for consideration as a standard in August 2007. It was then revised, voted on, and approved as an international standard by March 2009.

The following tags defined by the TimeML specification version 1.2.1.

The TIMEML tag is similar to the root tag in an XML document. It declares that the rest of the document surrounded by the TIMEML tag is encoded with TimeML tags.

The EVENT tag is used to annotate those elements in a text that mark the semantic events described by it. Syntactically, EVENTs are typically verbs, although event nominals, such as "crash" in "...killed by the crash", will also be annotated as EVENTs. The EVENT tag is also used to annotate a subset of the states in a document. This subset of states includes those that are either transient or explicitly marked as participating in a temporal relation. See the TimeML annotation guidelines for more details.

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