Introduction

Spanish TimeBank 1.0 was developed by researchers at Barcelona Media and consists of Spanish texts in the AnCora corpus annotated with temporal and event information according to the TimeML specification language.

TimeML (Pusteyovsky, et al., 2005) is a schema for annotating eventualities and time expressions in natural language as well as the temporal relations among them, thus facilitating the task of extraction, representation and exchange of temporal information. Spanish Timebank 1.0 is annotated in three levels, marking events, time expressions and event metadata. The TimeML annotation scheme was tailored for the specifics of the Spanish language. Temporal relations in Spanish present distinctions of verbal mood (e.g., indicative, subjunctive, conditional, etc.) and grammatical aspect (e.g., imperfective) which are absent in English. Spanish TimeBank 1.0 joins the family of TimeBank annotated corpora which includes languages such as English, Italian, French, Korean and Chinese. Through their common layer of annotation, these corpora provide resources useful for multilingual temporal extraction and processing, such as multilingual text entailment, opinion mining or question answering. Spanish Timebank 1.0 is the Spanish language complement to Catalan Timebank 1.0 LDC2012T10.

LDC has released other corpora incorporating TimeBank annotation: TimeBank 1.2 LDC2006T08, FactBank 1.0 LDC2009T23 and ModeS TimeBank 1.0 LDC2012T01.

Data

Spanish TimeBank 1.0 contains stand-off annotations for 210 documents with over 75,800 tokens (including punctuation marks) and 68,000 tokens (excluding punctuation). The source documents are news stories and fiction from the AnCora corpus.

The AnCora corpus is the largest multilayer annotated corpus of Spanish and Catalan. AnCora contains 400,000 words in Spanish and 275,000 words in Catalan. The AnCora documents are annotated on many linguistic levels including stucture, syntax, dependencies, semantics and pragmatics. That information is not included in this release, but it can be mapped to the present annotations. The data contained in the AnCora corpus has been used in several international natural language processing evaluations such as CoNLL-2006, CoNLL-2007 and SemEval-2007. The corpus is freely available from the Centre de Llenguatge i Computació (CLiC).

Samples

Content Copyright

Portions © 2012 Roser Saurí, Toni Badia, © 2012 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania