TEMANTEX: A Markup Language for Spanish Temporal Expressions and Indicators

We describe the TEMANTEX annotation scheme for temporal expressions and other lexical indicators of temporality and we analyze a first annotation experience. TEMANTEX is mainly a revision of the markup language TIMEX3, but with some additions and a different treatment for relative expressions. Our alternative proposal is justified for two reasons. First, our system aims to cover other temporality-related lexical elements by defining annotations for what we call temporal indicators, which do not have an equivalent in the TimeML system. Second, regarding temporal expressions, our scheme has relevant differences that improve the annotation process and the interpretation potential. A first task of corpus annotation on a set of 2.300 words, comprising 33 temporal expressions and 35 temporal indicators, showed encouraging results.