Extracting meaning from temporal nouns and temporal prepositions

This article provides a compositional semantics for temporal nouns and temporal prepositions that are annotated as temporal prepositional phrases or noun phrases by an automatic tagging system (e.g., last Monday, on Dec. 1 st , for three weeks or before Christmas ). Current temporal tagging systems rely on an ad-hoc-representation for temporal date and time expressions, but the more demanding tasks of temporal question-answering and automatic text summarization require a sound logical derivation and representation of temporal expressions. Our proposal draws from two formal accounts of temporal prepositional phrases by Pratt and Francez [2001] and von Stechow [2002b], and is realized within an automatic temporal tagging system for German newspaper articles.