Handling temporal relations in scheduling dialogues for an MT system

Handling temporal information has been a main concern of areas such as natural language processing, planning and knowledge representation. In scheduling dialogues in a machine translation (MT) system whose goal is setting up a meeting, temporal reference is central, and the relations between temporal expressions contain much of the ellipsis and anaphora to be resolved. As a consequence, filling in missing information contributes to the understanding of the text. In this paper, we first identify the various binary relations present in this kind of dialogue, characterize them, and, finally, present a mechanism for processing with temporal relations that is based on using the constraints found during the analysis