Ness Schelkens & Frank Van Eynde
University of Leuven
Centre for Computational Linguistics
Maria-Theresiastraat 21
3000 Leuven
A piece of discourse carries a lot of temporal information, in particular in the tenses of verbs. The precise temporal information is however not only dependent on verb tenses, but also on adverbials and general world knowledge. Also, many relations between the eventualities described in different sentences are entirely implicit.
We formalise the temporal information present in a discourse in Open Logic Programming, an integration of logic programming with first order logic. Using an abductive resolution procedure, we are then able to derive the available temporal relations, using information from verb tenses and adverbials plus default assumptions about the relations between different verb phrases.