Time Expression Tagger

action names
tagTimex
setReferenceTime

resources required
time rules (in YAML)
properties
Timex.rule
Timex.refTime
Timex.refFormat
annotations required
token
annotations added
TIMEX2

The Jet time expression tagger identifies and normalizes time expressions following the TIMEX2 standard.  For example, "He was born on July 4, 2008." would be tagged "He was born on <TIMEX2 VAL="2008-07-04">July 4, 2008</TIMEX2>." If the date is not fully specified, it will be normalized based on a reference time, typically the publication date of a news article.  For example, in an article published on July 4, 2008, the sentence "He was hired last October."  would be tagged "He was hired <TIMEX2 VAL="2007-10">last October</TIMEX2>.

The tagTimex action uses the time rules (in a file specified by property Timex.rule) to tag time expressions.

The reference time can be set in two ways.  It can be given explicitly (in ISO DateTime format) by property Timex.refTime.  Alternately, if the reference time is given by a field in the document, the setReferenceTime action can be applied over that field of the document.  The format of the reference time in the document is specified by property Timex.refFormat, using the syntax of Java SimpleDateFormat, such as YYYY-MM-dd for a year-month-day format.  If a document collection includes documents with different formats of reference time, a list of SimpleDataFormats can be specified, separated by "|" (with no blanks);  for example,
YYYY-MM-dd HH:mm:ss|YYYY-MM-dd for a calendar date optionally followed by a time.