Weekday name annotation

[Leon Derczynski]

Hi,

In Mazur & Dale's "What's the Date? High Accuracy Interpretation of
Weekday Names" (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?
cluster=5112281510133350068) it is posited that when English-language
newswire uses the current day's name (e.g. "Thursday") it refers to
the day when the article is written, instead of using "Today" as would
be expected in natural English language. Their case for this is
present in section 6 of the paper, where they suggest over 50% of
cases of weekday names are the current day's name and refer to the
document creation date. The evidence to support this is that a 7-day
sliding window baseline which maps the current day's name to the
document creation date performs with over 50% higher accuracy than one
which excludes the document creation date when anchoring a day name.

Has anybody else observed this, or seen how non-newswire / non-English
texts behave? It seems to be a pretty unusual (unique?) way of
describing the current date.


Leon

[Hector Llorens]

Thanks Leon for raising this issue.
I'm not a native English speaker and it seemed strange to me.

In Spanish, rarely, we use the preposition "en" instead of the common
"el" preposition before the weekday for referring that this is today.

2010/6/3 Leon Derczynski <le...@dcs.shef.ac.uk>:

[Jess]

Hi,

My name is Jessica Moszkowicz. I'm in the TimeML working group at
Brandeis. This has certainly been our observation when creating the
TimeBank corpus as well. For manual annotation, we would note the
document creation time (DCT) and then calculate the normalized value
of weekday names that were mentioned in the text using the DCT as an
anchor. It was almost always the case that the first weekday name
that was mentioned was the same day of the week as the DCT. I haven't
looked at non-newswire text specifically for this issue, but I imagine
it could have something to do with the possibility of the articles
being picked up and reprinted at a later date. I'm only speculating
about that, though.

-- Jess