Time out of joint in temporal annotations of texts: Challenges for artificial intelligence and human computer interaction

Starting from the experience of the TERENCE European project, the paper shows challenges that require a combined effort of natural language processing, automated temporal reasoning and, finally, human computer interaction. The paper starts introducing the problem of producing high quality temporal annotations for texts, and argues for a combined automated temporal reasoning and natural processing approach to tackle it. The paper then speculates that the approach would benefit from knowledge of the specific domain and of how humans interact with the annotation process, which triggers two further challenges explored in the remainder of the paper, at the intersection of natural language processing, automated reasoning and human computer interaction.