Temporal Context/Temporal Conception

These terms refer to temporarily related events in natural-language text. A temporal context scopes changing worldviews and serves as a tool for disambiguating time-dependent events or intervals. For example, the question, “Who was the President of the United States when Hurricane Katarina descended on New Orleans?” needs temporal event detection and context-based reasoning. There are several, standard, approaches to represent time or events in time. The most common approaches include absolute dating scheme, relative event ordering, and duration-based approaches. One of the main problems with temporal context is the lack of absolute timestamp for many events. Temporal conception addresses time as a medium of communication. It attempts to define the way people understand time and make use of it. The perception of physical time as a factor in an individual's subjective environment is itself a culturally changeable variable. No two people view the passage of time in the [Page 514]same way, although groups of people working in the same environments may view the passage of time in similar ways. For more information, see Moldovan, Clark, and Harabagiu (2009).