Information Retrieval for Temporal Bounding

Leon Derczynski, Robert J. Gaizauskas

Abstract: The temporal bounding problem is that of finding the beginning and ending times of a temporal interval during which an assertion holds. Existing approaches to temporal bounding have assumed the provision of a reference document from which to extract temporal bounds. We argue that a real-world setting does not include a reference document and that an information retrieval step is often required in order to locate documents containing candidate beginning and end times. We call this task "Information Retrieval for Temporal Bounding". This paper defines the task and discusses suitable evaluation metrics, as well as demonstrating the task's difficulty using a reference dataset.