Representation of temporal knowledge in events: The formalism, and its potential for legal narratives

Abstract

Whereas temporal interval algebras appear to be the class of formalisms from Artificial Intelligence that is currently privileged by such researchers who are trying to handle temporal information as found in legal documents, there does not appear to be a consensus, within AI for Law, about a structured method of integrating the representation of the temporal data into the broader picture of treating the events or the overall plot. We describe here a knowledge representation formalism well‐suited to take into account the temporal characteristics of narratives (of narrative documents). In these documents, the main part of the information content consists in the description of ‘events’ that relate the real or intended behaviour of some ‘actors’ (characters, personages, etc.). Narrative documents of an industrial and economic interest correspond, for example, to news stories, corporate documents (memos, policy statements, reports and minutes), normative and legal texts, intelligence messages, representation of the patient's medical records, etc. The formalism we present here is characterized by the following main properties: (i) it provides some general tools to deal with the ‘fuzziness’ which, in concrete situations, is inherently associated with the representation of any sort of ‘timestamp'; (ii) it offers a way of implementing an efficient temporal reasoner, able to deal, for example, with the purely mechanical aspects of the well‐known problem concerning the ‘persistence of a situation'; (Hi) it makes use of some second‐order representation tools (binding structures) to replace, to a certain extent, the interval algebra tools in the Allen style.