Annotating temporal and event quantification Harry Bunt and James Pustejovsky Tilburg Center for Creative Computing/ Department of Computer Sciences Tilburg University, The Netherlands / Brandeis University harry.bunt@uvt.nl, jamesp@cs.brandeis.edu Abstract In this paper we propose someimprove- ments to the proposed ISO-TimeML stan- dard for the semantic annotation of infor- mation about time and events. We argue that these improvements are called for, ei- ther in order to deal with suboptimal choices in the XML-based representation of annota- tion structures, or for resolving some of the difficulties that arise due to the impossibil- ity to separate semantic phenomena relating to time and events, like temporal quantifica- tion, from their more general form. We indi- cate solutions for both types of cases. 1 Introduction The definition of annotation languages has in recent years become a focal area of interest in the Inter- national Organization for Standardization ISO. Ex- pert groups have been formed with the aim to de- velop standards for the representation and annota- tion of language resources, such as the ISO-TEI standard for feature structure representations, the Lexical Markup Framework, standards for annotat- ing documents with morphosyntactic, syntactic, and semantic information, and the Linguistic Annotation Framework, a meta-standard for these efforts. In the area of semantic annotation, the project Semantic Annotation Framework was started, with several parts for dealing with different kinds of se- mantic information. Part 1 deals with the annotation of information related to time and events, and has proposed a standard (ISO 2009) which is based on TimeML (Pustejovsky et al., 2003), and is therefore called ‘ISO-TimeML’. The ISO-TimeML standard constitutes a significant step forward in the develop- ment of semantic annotation languages, in particular in comparison to its predecessor TimeML. Yet, ISO-TimeML also has certain shortcomings, some having to do with with suboptimal repre- sentational choices, some with underlying concep- tual choices that lack a solid foundation – in both cases mostly the result of taking over elements of TimeML. In this paper we will outline some of these deficiencies, and indicate how they may be resolved. This paper is organized as follows. In section 2 we very briefly characterize ISO-TimeML and its re- lation to TimeML. In section 3 we describe a num- ber of deficiencies of ISO-TimeML as an annotation representation language, and in section 4 we discuss some underlying conceptual problems, mostly hav- ing to do with the analysis of descriptions of recur- ring events and temporal and inter-event quantifica- tion. We end with concluding remarks in section 5. 2 Information about Time and Events 2.1 General characteristics ISO-TimeML is meant to allow the assignment of semantic mark-ups to expressions which: (1) de- note an event, state, or a process, such as finite verb forms and certain nouns (such as accident and con- cert; (2) relate events to aspectually related or sub- ordinate events, like started to laugh; wanted to cry; (3) describe dates, times, particular periods, such as the twenty-first century; last week; (4) indicate rela- tions between temporal entities, such as at, before,