Chronoscopes : A Theory of Underspecified Temporal Representations

Representation and reasoning about time and events is a fundamental aspect of our cognitive abilities and intrinsic to our construal of the structure of our personal and historical lives and recall of past experiences. These capabilities also underlie our understanding of narrative language. This paper describes an abstract device called a Chronoscope, that allows a temporal representation (a set of events and their temporal relations) to be viewed based on temporal abstractions. The temporal representation is augmented with abstract events called episodes that stand for discourse segments. The temporal abstractions allow one to collapse temporal relations, or view the representation at different time granularities (hour, day, month, year, etc.), with corresponding changes in event characterization and temporal relations at those granularities. The paper situates Chronoscopes in terms of systems for automatically extracting the temporal structure of narratives.