The Role of Semantic Context in the Temporal Interpretation of Events

The temporal interpretation of utterances is crucial to many applications of natural language understanding. The interpretation of utterances clearly depends on both the linguistics or semantic context and the non-linguistic or pragmatic context. We describe an approach by which the semantic context can be optimally used in interpreting events. We propose structured event representations or schemata for events of di erent situation types. We show how the schemata may be integrated into a discourse depending on the tense and aspect of the relevant sentences, and the temporal connectives involved. Our approach uses semantic information to a greater extent than previous approaches, and thereby generates constraints that more e ciently restrict the ultimate pragmatic interpretations. We apply our approach to the treatment of the notorious when-clauses, and show how this approach may be used for connectives with temporal implications.