Metaphors pervade discussions of critical issues and influence how people reason about these domains. For instance, when crime is a beast, people suggest enforcement-oriented approaches to crime-reduction (e.g., by augmenting the police force); when crime is a virus, on the other hand, people suggest systemic reforms for the affected community. In the current study, we find that extending metap...

In exploring large volumes of information, more often than not, one single visualization is not sufficient for grasping the whole data set. This may be due to different reasons: the screen real-estate is limited, the user’s capacity for comprehending a large data set also has limits, different views or perspectives of the same data may be needed to grasp all the details, and so on. Multiple vis...

We propose that metaphor is a mechanism by which motivational states in one conceptual domain can influence attitudes in a superficially unrelated domain. Two studies tested whether activating motives related to the self-concept influences attitudes toward social topics when the topics' metaphoric association to the motives is made salient through linguistic framing. In Study 1, heightened moti...

We introduce an annotation scheme for temporal expressions, and describe a method for resolving temporal expressions in print and broadcast news. The system, which is based on both hand-crafted and machine-learnt rules, achieves an 83.2% accuracy (Fmeasure) against hand-annotated data. Some initial steps towards tagging event chronologies are also described.

Work on the interpretation of temporal expressions in text has generally been pursued in one of two paradigms: the formal semantics approach, where an attempt is made to provide a well-grounded theoretical basis for the interpretation of these expressions, and the more pragmaticallyfocused approach represented by the development of the TIMEX2 standard, with its origins in work in information ex...

This paper presents a demonstration of a temporal reasoning system that addresses three fundamental tasks related to temporal expressions in text: extraction, normalization to time intervals and comparison. Our system makes use of an existing state-of-the-art temporal extraction system, on top of which we add several important novel contributions. In addition, we demonstrate that our system can...

Demonstrative terms are highly contextdependent elements both in deictic and anaphoric uses. When reference is transferred from a visual, threedimensional context to the textual domain, information-structure factors (i.e. the cognitive status of the antecedent, recency of mention, syntactic structure or the semantic type of the antecedent) have an effect on speaker preferences for selecting dem...

It is often assumed that the semantics of temporal expressions is directly related to the linear time concept familiar from high-school physics—that is, to a model based on the number line. However, there are good reasons for suspecting that such a conception is not the one that our linguistic categories are most directly related to. When-clauses provide an example of the mismatch between lingu...

We present an approach for detecting salient (important) dates in texts in order to automatically build event timelines from a search query (e.g. the name of an event or person, etc.). This work was carried out on a corpus of newswire texts in English provided by the Agence France Presse (AFP). In order to extract salient dates that warrant inclusion in an event timeline, we first recognize and...

We present the TARSQI Toolkit (TTK), a modular system for automatic temporal and event annotation of natural language texts. TTK identifies temporal expressions and events in natural language texts, and parses the document to order events and to anchor them to temporal expressions.