NarrativeTime: Dense High-Speed Temporal Annotation on a Timeline

We present NarrativeTime, a new timeline-based annotation scheme for temporal order of events in text, and a new densely annotated fiction corpus comparable to TimeBank-Dense. NarrativeTime is considerably faster than schemes based on event pairs such as TimeML, and it produces more temporal links between events than TimeBank-Dense, while maintaining comparable agreement on temporal links. This is achieved through new strategies for encoding vagueness in temporal relations and an annotation workflow that takes into account the annotators' chunking and commonsense reasoning strategies. NarrativeTime comes with new specialized web-based tools for annotation and adjudication.