Extracting Events with Informal Temporal References in Personal Histories in Online Communities

Miaomiao Wen, Zeyu Zheng, Hyeju Jang, Guang Xiang and Carolyn Rose

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Short Papers (ACL Short Papers 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013

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Abstract

We present a system for extracting the dates of illness events (year and month of the event occurrence) from posting histories in the context of an online medical support community. A temporal tagger retrieves and normalizes dates mentioned informally in social media to actual month and year referents. Building on this, an event date extraction system learns to integrate the likelihood of candidate dates extracted from time-rich sentences with temporal constraints extracted from event-related sentences. Our integrated model achieves 89.7% of the maximum performance given the performance of the temporal expression retrieval step.

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