Multilingual Normalization of Temporal Expressions with Masked Language Models

Lukas Lange, Jannik Strötgen, Heike Adel, Dietrich Klakow


Abstract
The detection and normalization of temporal expressions is an important task and preprocessing step for many applications. However, prior work on normalization is rule-based, which severely limits the applicability in real-world multilingual settings, due to the costly creation of new rules. We propose a novel neural method for normalizing temporal expressions based on masked language modeling. Our multilingual method outperforms prior rule-based systems in many languages, and in particular, for low-resource languages with performance improvements of up to 33 F1 on average compared to the state of the art.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.84
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1174–1186
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.84
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.84
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lukas Lange, Jannik Strötgen, Heike Adel, and Dietrich Klakow. 2023. Multilingual Normalization of Temporal Expressions with Masked Language Models. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1174–1186, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multilingual Normalization of Temporal Expressions with Masked Language Models (Lange et al., EACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.84.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.84.mp4