TIMEX at MUC-7

The full MUC-7 TIMEX Guidelines are available at www.itl.nist.gov/iaui/894.02/related_projects/muc/proceedings/ne_task.html. The approach taken to annotation in MUC-7, in 1998, embodied a number of modifications to the MUC-6 scheme:

1. As in MUC-6, temporal expressions were to be tagged as a single item and contiguous subparts (such as month, day and year in a complete date) were not to be separately tagged. An exception was added to this rule, however, in those cases where the taggable expressions were of two distinct TIMEX sub-types, as in a date followed by a time, or a time followed by a date.
   Examples:
   <TIMEX TYPE="DATE">February 12</TIMEX>, <TIMEX TYPE="TIME">8 A.M.</TIMEX>
   by <TIMEX TYPE="TIME">9 o’clock</TIMEX><TIMEX TYPE="DATE">Monday</TIMEX>
2. Some aspects of the MUC-6 guidelines that had been left underdetermined were tightened up; in particular, determiners that introduce temporal expressions were explicitly not to be tagged, and words or phrases modifying the expressions, such as around or about, were also not to be tagged.
   Examples:
   around the <TIMEX TYPE="DATE">4th of May</TIMEX>
   shortly after the <TIMEX TYPE="DATE">4th of May</TIMEX>
3. A major departure from the MUC-6 annotation scheme was that MUC-7 included relative temporal expressions; however, these were not annotated any differently from absolute temporal expressions. See MUC-7 TIMEX annotation guidelines for details.
4. Holidays referenced by name were to be tagged.
5. In contrast to the treatment in MUC-6, LOCATION expressions appearing within time expressions were not to be separately tagged as instances of ENAMEX.
   Examples:
   <TIMEX TYPE="TIME">1:30 p.m. Chicago time</TIMEX>
   <TIMEX TYPE="TIME">Japan time, 19 February, 8:00 A.M.</TIMEX>