Which New York, which Monday? The role of background knowledge and intended audience in automatic disambiguation of spatiotemporal expressions

Abstract

The aim of MiniSTEx, a system for automatic spatiotemporal annotation, is to locate eventualities on a time-axis and to disambiguate geospatial information in such a way that geospatial entities can be located on a map. Therefore all kinds of spatiotemporal (geospatial, temporal and geotemporal) expressions are disambiguated. In doing so, the concepts of “background knowledge” and “intended audience”, together with the Gricean maxims, play an important role, especially when dealing with indexicals. The system relies on a database containing all kinds of spatiotemporal expressions. At the moment MiniSTEx is used for both Dutch and English texts.