Extraction of temporal information from texts in Swedish

In English This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a generic component to extract temporal information from texts in Swedish. It proceeds in two steps. The first step extracts time expressions and events, and generates a feature vector for each element it identifies. Using the vectors, the second step determines the
temporal relations, possibly none, between the extracted events and orders them in time.
We used a machine learning approach to find the relations between events. To run the learning algorithm, we collected a corpus of road accident reports from newspapers websites that we manually annotated. It enabled us to train decision trees and to evaluate the performance of the algorithm.