NCARAI SPRING 2003 SEMINAR SERIES Reasoning About Time and Events Professor James Pustejovsky Department of Computer Science Volen Center for Complex Systems Brandeis University Monday, April 28, 2003 10am, NRL Building 60 Auditorium Abstract: In this talk we will provide a description of TimeML, a rich specification language for event and temporal expressions in natural language text, developed in the context of the AQUAINT program on Question Answering Systems. Unlike most previous work on event annotation, TimeML captures three distinct phenomena in temporal markup: it systematically anchors event predicates to a broad range of temporally denotating expressions it orders event expressions in text relative to one another, both intrasententially and in discourse it allows for a delayed (underspecified) interpretation of partially determined temporal expressions. We demonstrate the expressiveness of TimeML for a broad range of syntactic and semantic contexts, including aspectual predication, modal subordination, and an initial treatment of lexical and constructional causation in text. Biographical Information: James Pustejovsky is a Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University, where he is Director of the Laboratory for Linguistics and Computation. Dr. Pustejovsky conducts research in the areas of computational linguistics, lexical semantics, knowledge representation, and information retrieval and extraction, and is the founder of Generative Lexicon Theory. He was organizer and PI for the ARDA-sponsored research workshop, ``Temporal and Event Recognition for Question Answering Systems", which has created the metadata markup language, TimeML. He has participated in numerous DARPA and NSF efforts in Knowledge Extraction and Natural Language Engineering, including the MUC and TIPSTER projects. Pustejovsky was the founding chair of the ACL's Special Interest Group on the Lexicon, SIGLEX, and was editor of "Squibs and Discussion" in the journal Computational Linguistics from 1993-1996. He has organized and chaired numerous international workshops and conferences on language technologies, computational semantics, and linguistics, and was chair of the 1994 ACL general conference in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is author of numerous books on semantics and corpus processing, including: "Language and the Multiplicity of Meaning" (forthcoming), MIT Press, "Readings in the Lexicon" (with Yorick Wilks) (2003) MIT Press, "Time and Event Recognition in Natural Language" (2003) CSLI/U. Chicago Press, "Lexical Semantics and the Problem of Polysemy" (1997), Oxford, "Corpus Processing for Lexical Acquisition (1996), MIT Press, "The Generative Lexicon" (1995), MIT Press, "Semantics and the Lexicon" (1993), Kluwer, "Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation" (1992), Springer. He is a BBS Associate and a reviewer for most major journals in linguistics and computational linguistics. Dr. Pustejovsky is a graduate of MIT. After studying in Marburg, Germany on a DAAD Fellowship, he attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he received his Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1985. He then spent the next two years as a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department there, working on Natural Language Processing. Since 1986, he has been on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Brandeis University and a member of the Volen Center for Complex Systems. Dr. Pustejovsky is the founder and a board member of the natural language software company LingoMotors Inc. of Cambridge, and was its CTO until July, 2002.