A Machine Learning Approach to Extract Temporal Information from Texts in Swedish and Generate Animated 3D Scenes

In English Carsim is a program that automatically converts narratives into 3D scenes. Carsim considers authentic texts describing road accidents, generally collected from web sites of Swedish newspapers or transcribed from hand-written accounts by victims of accidents. One of the program’s key features is that it animates the generated scene to visualize events.
To create a consistent animation, Carsim extracts the participants mentioned in a text and identifies what they do. In this paper, we focus on the extraction of temporal
relations between actions. We first describe how we detect time expressions and events. We then present a machine
learning technique to order the sequence of events identified in the narratives. We finally report the results we obtained.