As Time Goes By

Temporal expressions (TempEx's for short) are increasingly important in search, question answering, information extraction, and more. Techniques for identifying and normalizing explicit temporal expressions work well, but are not designed for and cannot cope with textual phrases that denote named events, such as "Clinton's term as secretary of state". This paper addresses the problem of detecting such temponyms, inferring their temporal scopes, and mapping them to events in a knowledge base if present there.