French TimeBank: An ISO-TimeML Annotated Reference Corpus

Abstract

This article presents the main points in the cre-ation of the French TimeBank (Bittar, 2010), a reference corpus annotated according to the ISO-TimeML standard for temporal annota-tion. A number of improvements were made to the markup language to deal with linguistic phenomena not yet covered by ISO-TimeML, including cross-language modifications and others specific to French. An automatic pre-annotation system was used to speed up the annotation process. A preliminary evaluation of the methodology adopted for this project yields positive results in terms of data quality and annotation time. 1