Classifying Temporal Relations Between Events

This paper describes a fully automatic twostage machine learning architecture that learns temporal relations between pairs of events. The first stage learns the temporal attributes of single event descriptions, such as tense, grammatical aspect, and aspectual class. These imperfect guesses, combined with other linguistic features, are then used in a second stage to classify the temporal relationship between two events. We present both an analysis of our new features and results on the TimeBank Corpus that is 3% higher than previous work that used perfect human tagged features.