Introduction

TimeBank 1.2 was developed by Brandeis University and contains 183 English news articles with over 27,000 event and temporal annotations, adding events, times and temporal links between events and times. The annotation follows the TimeML 1.2.1 specification.

Data

TimeML aims to capture and represent temporal information. This is accomplished using four primary tag types: TIMEX3 for temporal expressions, EVENT for temporal events, SIGNAL for temporal signals, and LINK for representing relationships. For a detailed description of TimeML, see the TimeML 1.2.1 Specification and Guidelines included in the corpus package documentation.

Here are descriptions for each tag:

TIMEX3 - Captures dates, times, durations, and sets of dates and times.
EVENT - Annotates those elements in a text that mark the semantic events described by it.
MAKEINSTANCE - Creates tags for events that include information about a particular instance of the event. When an event participates in a relationship, it is actually the event instance that is referenced.
SIGNAL - Annotates temporal function words such as "after," "during," and "when."

The following three tags are link tags. They capture temporal, subordination, and aspectual relationships found in the text. These tags do not consume any actual text, but they do relate the four tag types above to each other.

TLINK - Temporally relates two temporal expressions, two event instances, or a temporal expression and an event instance.
SLINK - Captures subordination relationships that involve event modality, evidentiality, and factuality.
ALINK - Captures an aspectual connection between two event instances.

TimeBank 1.2 contains 183 articles with just over 61,000 non-punctuation tokens. The count for each TimeML tag is listed below:

EVENT	7,935
MAKEINSTANCE	7,940
TIMEX3	1,414
SIGNAL	688
ALINK	265
SLINK	2,932
TLINK	6,418
Total	27,592

Samples

For an example of the data in this corpus, please view the following sample (XML).

Updates

None at this time.

Portions © 1998 American Broadcasting Corporation, © 1998 The Associated Press, © 1998 Cable News Network, LP, LLLP, © 1987-1989 Dow Jones & Company, Inc., © 1998 New York Times, © 1998 Public Radio International, © 2002-2006 Brandeis University, © 2006 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania

The World is a co-production of Public Radio International and the British Broadcasting Corporation and is produced at WGBH Boston.