TimeTank: A Corpus of Sentences Annotated with TimeInfo for Temporal Data

Annotating temporal information in texts is a challenging and time-consuming task. It requires an understanding of natural language, as well as knowledge about the various ways in which temporal data can be expressed and structured in a text. However, the ability to access temporal semantics through computer tools is crucial for many applications that involve interpreting and understanding texts. A corpus available in this field is TimeBank (Pustejovsky et al., 2003), which was annotated using the TimeML annotation scheme (Pustejovsky et al., 2003), a scheme that does not support complex temporal expressions. We proposed a new annotation scheme for temporal information in scientific texts: TimeInfo (Yahiaoui &amp; Atanassova, 2022) which allows for more precise and directly usable annotations. The corpus presented here, named TimeTank, consists of 1186 sentences containing a total of 1200 temporal expressions annotated according to the TimeInfo annotation scheme. These sentences are drawn from 603 scientific articles from the CORD-19 corpus (Wang et al., 2020). The sentences were identified and annotated automatically, and the quality of the annotations was manually verified.<br> <br> TimeTank can be employed for the evaluation or training of machine learning models focused on the detection, extraction, and annotation of temporal expressions. The corpus offers a reliable dataset labeled to serve as a foundation for supervised learning. Bibliography Pustejovsky, James, et al. "The timebank corpus." Corpus linguistics. Vol. 2003. 2003.<br> Pustejovsky, James, et al. "TimeML: Robust specification of event and temporal expressions in text." New directions in question answering 3 (2003): 28-34.<br> Wang, Lucy Lu, et al. "Cord-19: The covid-19 open research dataset." ArXiv (2020).<br> Yahiaoui, Salah, and Iana Atanassova. "TimeInfo: a Semantic Annotation Framework for Temporal Information in Scientific Papers." Terminology &amp; Ontology: Theories and applications (TOTH 2022). 2022.