We describe TweeTIME, a temporal tagger for recognizing and normalizing time expressions in Twitter. Most previous work in social media analysis has to rely on temporal resolvers that are designed for well-edited text, and therefore suffer from the reduced performance due to domain mismatch. We present a minimally supervised method that learns from large quantities of unlabeled data and requires no hand-engineered rules or hand-annotated training corpora. TweeTIME achieves 0.68 F1 score on the end-to-end task of resolving date expressions, outperforming a broad range of state-of-the-art systems.
Temporal Resolvers primarily utilize either rule-based or probabilistic approaches. Notable rule-based systems such as TempEx @cite_17 , SUTime @cite_18 and HeidelTime @cite_14 provide particularly competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art machine learning methods. Probabilistic approaches use supervised classifiers trained on in-domain annotated data @cite_38 @cite_6 @cite_20 or hybrid with hand-engineered rules @cite_40 @cite_15 . UWTime @cite_15 is one of the most recent and competitive systems and uses Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG).
@cite_38 @cite_18 @cite_14 @cite_6 @cite_40 @cite_15 @cite_20 @cite_17
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Background The Sixth Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) Natural Language Processing Challenge for Clinical Records focused on the temporal relations in clinical narratives. The organizers provided the research community with a corpus of discharge summaries annotated with temporal information, to be used for the development and evaluation of temporal reasoning systems. 18 teams from around the world participated in the challenge. During the workshop, participating teams presented comprehensive reviews and analysis of their systems, and outlined future research directions suggested by the challenge contributions. @PARASPLIT Methods The challenge evaluated systems on the information extraction tasks that targeted: (1) clinically significant events, including both clinical concepts such as problems, tests, treatments, and clinical departments, and events relevant to the patient's clinical timeline, such as admissions, transfers between departments, etc; (2) temporal expressions, referring to the dates, times, durations, or frequencies phrases in the clinical text. The values of the extracted temporal expressions had to be normalized to an ISO specification standard; and (3) temporal relations, between the clinical events and temporal expressions. Participants determined pairs of events and temporal expressions that exhibited a temporal relation, and identified the temporal relation between them. @PARASPLIT Results For event detection, statistical machine learning (ML) methods consistently showed superior performance. While ML and rule based methods seemed to detect temporal expressions equally well, the best systems overwhelmingly adopted a rule based approach for value normalization. For temporal relation classification, the systems using hybrid approaches that combined ML and heuristics based methods produced the best results. Automatic sleep staging has been often treated as a simple classification problem that aims at determining the label of individual target polysomnography epochs one at a time. In this paper, we tackle the task as a sequence-to-sequence classification problem that receives a sequence of multiple epochs as input and classifies all of their labels at once. For this purpose, we propose a hierarchical recurrent neural network named SeqSleepNet (source code is available at http: github.com pquochuy SeqSleepNet ). At the epoch processing level, the network consists of a filterbank layer tailored to learn frequency-domain filters for preprocessing and an attention-based recurrent layer designed for short-term sequential modeling. At the sequence processing level, a recurrent layer placed on top of the learned epoch-wise features for long-term modeling of sequential epochs. The classification is then carried out on the output vectors at every time step of the top recurrent layer to produce the sequence of output labels. Despite being hierarchical, we present a strategy to train the network in an end-to-end fashion. We show that the proposed network outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches, achieving an overall accuracy, macro F1-score, and Cohen’s kappa of 87.1 , 83.3 , and 0.815 on a publicly available dataset with 200 subjects. Temporal annotations of facts are a key component both for building a high-accuracy knowledge base and for answering queries over the resulting temporal knowledge base with high precision and recall. In this paper, we present a temporal-probabilistic database model for cleaning uncertain temporal facts obtained from information extraction methods. Specifically, we consider a combination of temporal deduction rules, temporal consistency constraints and probabilistic inference based on the common possible-worlds semantics with data lineage, and we study the theoretical properties of this data model. We further develop a query engine which is capable of scaling to very large temporal knowledge bases, with nearly interactive query response times over millions of uncertain facts and hundreds of thousands of grounded rules. Our experiments over two real-world datasets demonstrate the increased robustness of our approach compared to related techniques based on constraint solving via Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and probabilistic inference via Markov Logic Networks (MLNs). We are also able to show that our runtime performance is more than competitive to current ILP solvers and the fastest available, probabilistic but non-temporal, database engines. Machine learning research has, to a great extent, ignored an important aspect of many real world applications: time. Existing concept learners predominantly operate on a static set of attributes; for example, classifying flowers described by leaf size, pet al colour and pet al count. However, many real datasets are not static; they cannot sensibly be represented as a fixed set of attributes. Rather, the examples are expressed as features that vary temporally, and it is the temporal variation itself that is used for classification. Consider a simple gesture recognition domain, in which the temporal features are the position of the hands, finger bends, and so on. Looking at the position of the hand at one point in time is not likely to lead to a successful classification; it is only by analysing changes in position that recognition is possible. This thesis presents a new technique for temporal classification. By extracting sub-events from the training instances and parameterising them to allow feature construction for a subsequent learning process, it is able to employ background knowledge and express learnt concepts in terms of the background knowledge. The novel results of the thesis are: a temporal learner capable of producing comprehensible and accurate classifiers for multivariate time series that can learn from a small number of instances and can integrate non-temporal features; a feature construction technique that parameterises sub-events of the training set and clusters them to construct features for a propositional learner; and a technique for post-processing classification rules produced by the learner to give a comprehensible description expressed in the same form as the original background knowledge. The thesis discusses the implementation of TClass, a temporal learner. Results show rules that are comprehensible in many cases and accuracy results close to or better than existing technique—over 98 per cent for sign language and 72 per cent for ECGs (equivalent to the accuracy of a human cardiologist). One further surprising result is that a small set of very primitive sub-events proves to be functional, avoiding the need for labour-intensive background knowledge if it is not available.