Annotating "tense" in a Tense-less Language

In the context of Natural Language Processing, annotation is about recovering implicit information that is useful for natural language applications. In this paper we describe a “tense” annotation task for Chinese, a language that does not have grammatical tense, that is designed to infer the temporal location of a situation in relation to the temporal deixis, the moment of speech. If successful, this would be a highly rewarding endeavor as it has application in many natural language systems. Our preliminary experiments show that while this is a very challenging annotation task for which high annotation consistency is very difficult but not impossible to achieve. We show that guidelines that provide a conceptually intuitive framework will be crucial to the success of this annotation effort.