Multilingual Recognition of Temporal Expressions

Michal Starý, Zuzana Neverilová, Jakub Valcík
2020 Recent Advances in Slavonic Natural Languages Processing  
The paper presents a multilingual approach to temporal expression recognition (TER) using existing tools and their combination. We observe that the rules based methods perform well on documents using wellformed temporal expressions in a narrower domain (e.g., news), while data driven methods are more stable within less standard language and texts across domains. With combination of the two approaches, we achieved F1 of 0.73 and 0.9 for strict and relaxed evaluations respectively on one English
more » ... ataset. Although these results do not achieve the state-of-the-art on English, the same method outperformed the state-of-the-art results in a multilingual setting not only in recall but also in F1. We see this as a strong indication that combining rule based systems with data driven models such as BERT is a valid approach to improve the overall performance in TER, especially for languages other than English. Further observations indicate that in the domain of office documents, the combined method is able to recognize general temporal expressions as well as domain specific ones (e.g., those used in financial documents).
dblp:conf/raslan/StaryNV20 fatcat:ctgt25yfwnhyzh6phkzubd6d4i