One Tense per Scene: Predicting Tense in Chinese Conversations

We study the problem of predicting tense in Chinese conversations. The unique challenges include: (1) Chinese verbs do not have explicit lexical or grammatical forms to indicate tense; (2) Tense information is often implicitly hidden outside of the target sentence. To tackle these challenges, we first propose a set of novel sentence-level (local) features using rich linguistic resources and then propose a new hypothesis of “One tense per scene” to incorporate scene-level (global) evidence to enhance the performance. Experimental results demonstrate the power of this hybrid approach, which can serve as a new and promising benchmark.