Acquiring temporal constraints between relations

Partha Pratim Talukdar, Derry Wijaya, Tom Mitchell

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference PaperResearchpeer-review

23 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We consider the problem of automatically acquiring knowledge about the typical temporal orderings among relations (e.g., actedIn(person, film) typically occurs before wonPrize (film, award)), given only a database of known facts (relation instances) without time information, and a large document collection. Our approach is based on the conjecture that the narrative order of verb mentions within documents correlates with the temporal order of the relations they represent. We propose a family of algorithms based on this conjecture, utilizing a corpus of 890m dependency parsed sentences to obtain verbs that represent relations of interest, and utilizing Wikipedia documents to gather statistics on narrative order of verb mentions. Our proposed algorithm, GraphOrder, is a novel and scalable graph-based label propagation algorithm that takes transitivity of temporal order into account, as well as these statistics on narrative order of verb mentions. This algorithm achieves as high as 38.4% absolute improvement in F1 over a random baseline. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of this learned general knowledge about typical temporal orderings among relations, by showing that these temporal constraints can be successfully used by a joint inference framework to assign specific temporal scopes to individual facts.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCIKM 2012 - Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
Pages992-1001
Number of pages10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
EventACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 2012 - Maui, United States of America
Duration: 29 Oct 20122 Nov 2012
Conference number: 21st
https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/2396761

Conference

ConferenceACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management 2012
Abbreviated titleCIKM 2012
Country/TerritoryUnited States of America
CityMaui
Period29/10/122/11/12
Internet address

Keywords

  • graph-based semi-supervised learning
  • knowledge bases
  • label propagation
  • narrative ordering
  • temporal ordering
  • temporal scoping

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