Why Time Resembles Rail Yards? A Way to Look at Time in Text Books

We present in this paper a proposal for representing temporality phenomena as expressed by specific free writing techniques, such as temporal discontinuities, transitions from one story to another, flashbacks and change of perspective, phenomena naturally understood by a casual human reader of the text. The long time intention is to develop a technique capable to reproduce on a machine the human reader performances with a sufficiently high accuracy. The diagrams we draw, called time yards, and the associated XML notations include: time tracks, themselves being made out of time segments, the atoms of time segments being the events. The paper makes a preliminary evaluation of the objectivity of recognizing these concepts as catched by a group of annotators.