A logic-based calculus of events
New Generation Computing
Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals
Communications of the ACM
EACL '89 Proceedings of the fourth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
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This paper presents an approach to deal with the underspecification of Aktionsarten in German sentences. In German the difference between an accomplishment and the associated progressive state is often not marked on the sentence level. This distinction is important for correctly interpreting texts and for translation into languages which provide morphological markings of Aktionsarten. To maintain compositionality we suggest a two-step analysis of a text with respect to the temporal relations and the classification as events or states. This analysis is guided by the Discourse Representation Theory developed by Kamp and makes use of world knowledge and an inference component.The problem of classification can be reformulated as the problem of finding an embedding function f from the representational entities onto the domain of a model. The models we use are structures built from intervals of time, events and individuals. Considering intensional models of this type will allow us to give truth-conditions for progressive states related to corresponding accomplishments. We restrict ourselves to progressive states of intentional actions and use the beliefs of the agent.