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CATS: An Annotation Scheme of Causality and Temporal Structure

Summary

Causal and temporal links between events are closely intertwined in discourse, yet most annotation frameworks encode them separately or address only one of them. The authors propose CATS, an annotation scheme for news texts that models both dimensions together. CATS builds on two parts of the ISO 24617 Semantic Annotation Framework: Part 1 (Time and Events) and Part 8 (Semantic Relations in Discourse). It also extends the Text2Story multilayer framework. The temporal machinery of Text2Story is adapted, and new entities and links are added for causal arguments and the signals that mark causality. The paper describes how the scheme was developed. It also examines incompatibilities between the two ISO parts and proposes ways to reconcile them. The outcome is a single structure that links events, temporal relations, causal arguments and causal cues. This makes it possible to study how causal relations are anchored in time and how mere temporal succession is distinguished from genuine causation. The scheme is meant to benefit NLP applications that involve identifying events, arranging them chronologically and reasoning about causes.

Key points

  • CATS combines ISO 24617-1:2012 (ISO-TimeML, time and events) with ISO 24617-8:2016 (discourse relations). It extends the Text2Story scheme (Silvano et al., 2021).
  • New annotation elements cover causal arguments and causal signals, which are linked to events and temporal relations within one unified representation.
  • The authors argue that causes do not always precede their effects. Simultaneity and inclusion between cause and effect events also occur.
  • The paper positions CATS against existing resources, which mostly handle causality and temporality in separate layers:
    • causal resources such as PDTB, BECauSE 1.0/2.0 and the Causal News Corpus;
    • joint approaches by Bethard and Martin (2008) and Mirza and Tonelli (2014).
  • The paper's contributions are the integrated scheme itself, its development methodology, and a critical analysis of conflicts between the two ISO parts with proposed solutions.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/59sf68tob5uy

@inproceedings{yu2026cats,
  title = {{CATS: An Annotation Scheme of Causality and Temporal Structure}},
  author = {Yu, Nana and Silvano, Purificação and Cunha, Luís Filipe and Jorge, Alípio},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22nd Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation and Representation (ISA-22) @ LREC 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/59sf68tob5uy},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/59sf68tob5uy}
}

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