Newspaper texts, narratives and other texts describe events occurring in time, explicitly and implicitly specifying the temporal location and order of these events. Text comprehension requires the capability to identify the events described in a text and to locate them in time.

We provide three tasks that are relevant to understanding the temporal structure of a text: (i) identification of events, (ii) identification of time expressions and (iii) identification of temporal relations. The temporal relations task is further structured into four sub tasks, requiring systems to recognize which of a fixed set of temporal relations holds between (a) events and time expressions within the same sentence (b) events and the document creation time (c) main events in consecutive sentences, and (d) two events where one syntactically dominates the other.

Data sets will be provided for five languages: English, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Korean. The data sets do not comprise a parallel corpus and sizes may range from 25K to 150K tokens. The annotation scheme used is based on TimeML. TimeML (http://www.timeml.org) has been developed over the last decade as a general multilingual markup language for temporal information in texts and is currently vetted as an ISO standard.

Participants can choose any combination of the three main tasks and the five languages.

Tempeval-2 is a follow-up on Tempeval-1, which was an initial evaluation exercise based on three limited temporal relation tasks. See http://www.timeml.org/tempeval-2/ for more information.

• March 12th, first batch of training data
• March 21st, second batch of training data
• March 28th, evaluation data
• April 2nd, close of Tempeval competition