Analysis And Inference Of Chinese Temporal Semantics

Semantics is an explanation of the objective world. It's the base of Natural Language Understood. We choose the temporal semantics of Chinese as the subject and do many researches in depth. As we all know, everything of the objective world exists in the course of temporal changing. Although the natural languages describing the development and movement of the things are different, the temporal information embodied in them is the same completely. Namely, time is a common concept to all people and its semantic meaning won't change with the language. We hope that the methods of the temporal semantic investigation can help to deal with other kinds of semantics. That is to say, we begin with the study of the temporal semantics and then enlarge it to other kinds of semantic research, such as space semantics, attribution semantics, etc. Hence, we get a whole system of NLU.We do our research from two parts of the theory and design a Temporal Semantic Analyzing and Reasoning System. It is made up of two parts. One is related to Chinese and the other is irrelated to Chinese. The former is to distinguish the temporal information from the text and to fill in a temporal semantic form. The latter is to reason. In order to extract the temporal semantic information automatically, we devise a temporal syntax dictionary and a temporal Ontology, which respectively record the syntax and semantic information of Chinese temporal words. The establishment of Ontology is one of our emphases in the research. The system synthesizes the semantic information of words into the integrated meaning of temporal noun phrases by TPIA and TQA and then judges the two temporal characters of events by EDCDA and R2, which is a set of judging rules. In this way, we get the elementary information of time and the temporal characters of events from the text and transform them into a directed constraint network. We do the temporal reasoning by PCN and R1, which is a set of rules about changing the two kinds of restriction. Then we find out a minimal network, which concludes the temporal relations of all events, and answer some questions about temporal information.This article encircles the design of TSARS. It introduces the functions and the realizing methods of the two parts which are related and irrelated to Chinese respectively. Then it describes the structure of the system and its working process.