Report from the text analysis techniques topic session

Lois Childs discussed GE's efforts to extract temporal expressions from text through the identification of relevant patterns . The Shogun system used 37 patterns in English, and 7 for Japanese . Patterns wer e context dependent, and referenced a dateline in order to handle relative time . The patterns were able to perform temporal calculations, and the system computed a temporal structure from reference points on th e dateline. The system was able to handle temporal references which were spread throughout a message . This approach allowed the Shogun system to have a good coverage of time fills ; extensions to this approach wil l provide improved handling of ambiguous dates .