Understanding temporal information in the text is fundamental for deep language understanding and key to many advanced NLP applications, such as question answering, information extraction, timeline visualization, and document summarization. These techniques can be applied in news, medical, history and other domains.
In this talk, I will present our hybrid system to automatically extract temporal information from raw text by extracting events, temporal expressions and identifying temporal relations between them. Our system had a competitive performance in the temporal evaluation shared task - TempEval 2010. Next, I will present a metric that we developed for evaluation of temporal annotation. Our metric has been adopted by the premier temporal evaluation shared task, TempEval 2013, for evaluating participating systems. Finally, I will present a question-answering system that can answer temporal questions with temporal reasoning. Our developed QA system can also be used to evaluate temporal information understanding capability.
I will also briefly talk about my other projects, ranging from multimodal summarization of complex sentence to game prediction using social media.
Bio: Naushad UzZaman is a PhD candidate under Professor James F. Allen in the Computer Science department at the University of Rochester (URCS). His research interests are in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), with focus on Temporal Information Processing, Information Extraction, Social Media Text Analysis, Medical NLP, Question Answering, and Multimodal Summarization. At URCS, he primarily worked on temporal information processing. He is co-organizing the TempEval 2013 shared task. He also worked on making information accessible with Jeffrey Bigham. He has done multiple research internships in various domains, such as, game prediction using social media (Yahoo! Research), medical NLP (Microsoft Medical Media Lab), and car dialog systems (Bosch Research and Technology Center).