Conceptual-graph approach for the representation of temporal information in discourse

摘要

‘Time’ has been studied by researchers in several disciplines, such as philosophy, logic, linguistics, artificial intelligence and physics. The temporal models that have been proposed usually present significant differences which reflect the different research purposes of their authors. This variety of approaches can be benefited from in the study of temporal knowledge in discourse. The paper proposes a framework for representing discourse temporal structures on the basis of the conceptual graph approach.Three modelling levels are distinguished that help in the classification of the origin of temporal information that is found in a discourse: the world, conceptual and linguistic levels. A model is proposed for the specification of world-level representations, i.e. temporal situations, time intervals and temporal relationships. Conceptual-level notions that are used to model time-coordinate systems in discourses, i.e. temporal perspectives and localizations, are introduced. These different knowledge structures allow the representation of the discourse conceptual structure. It is shown how the discourse conceptual structure can be enriched so that the various linguistic properties of discourses (anaphoras, sentence markers) can be integrated.