In this paper I argue that the presentist cannot deal adequately with cross-temporal relations. I look at several attempts to solve the cross-temporal relations objection and find only one that might work. Still I argue that even it can't deal with cross-temporal spatial relations such as continuity. I defend Sider here against two plausible responses. The first is that instantaneous velocities can be employed on the presentist's behalf to get them out of trouble. I argue that this response won't work. The second is a response by Dean Zimmerman in which the presentist accepts that past space-time points exist at present. I argue that his response does indeed provide us with a solution but that the cost of that solution is far too high. / text

Possession is an asymmetric semantic relation between two entities, where one entity (the possessee) belongs to the other entity (the possessor). Automatically extracting possessions are useful in identifying skills, recommender systems and in natural language understanding. Possessions can be found in different communication modalities including text, images, videos, and audios. In this dissertation, I elaborate on the techniques I used to extract possessions. I begin with extracting possessions at the sentence level including the type and temporal anchors. Then, I extract the duration of possession and co-possessions (if multiple possessors possess the same entity). Next, I extract possessions from an entire Wikipedia article capturing the change of possessors over time. I extract possessions from social media including both text and images. Finally, I also present dense annotations generating possession timelines. I present separate datasets, detailed corpus analysis, and machine learning models for each task described above.

The ability to capture the temporal dimension of a natural language text is essential to many natural language processing applications, such as Question Answering, Automatic Summarisation, and Information Retrieval. Temporal processing is a ¯eld of Computational Linguistics which aims to access this dimension and derive a precise temporal representation of a natural language text by extracting time expressions, events and temporal relations, and then representing them according to a chosen knowledge framework. This thesis focuses on the investigation and understanding of the di®erent ways time is expressed in natural language, on the implementation of a temporal processing system in accordance with the results of this investigation, on the evaluation of the system, and on the extensive analysis of the errors and challenges that appear during system development. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop the ability to automatically annotate temporal expressions, verbal events and temporal relations in a natural language text. Temporal expression annotation involves two stages: temporal expression identi¯cation concerned with determining the textual extent of a temporal expression, and temporal expression normalisation which ¯nds the value that the temporal expression designates and represents it using an annotation standard. The research presented in this thesis approaches these tasks with a knowledge-based methodology that tackles temporal expressions according to their semantic classi¯cation. Several knowledge sources and normalisation models are experimented with to allow an analysis of their impact on system performance. The annotation of events expressed using either ¯nite or non-¯nite verbs is addressed with a method that overcomes the drawback of existing methods v which associate an event with the class that is most frequently assigned to it in a corpus and are limited in coverage by the small number of events present in the corpus. This limitation is overcome in this research by annotating each WordNet verb with an event class that best characterises that verb. This thesis also describes an original methodology for the identi¯cation of temporal relations that hold among events and temporal expressions. The method relies on sentence-level syntactic trees and a propagation of temporal relations between syntactic constituents, by analysing syntactic and lexical properties of the constituents and of the relations between them. The detailed evaluation and error analysis of the methods proposed for solving di®erent temporal processing tasks form an important part of this research. Various corpora widely used by researchers studying di®erent temporal phenomena are employed in the evaluation, thus enabling comparison with state of the art in the ¯eld. The detailed error analysis targeting each temporal processing task helps identify not only problems of the implemented methods, but also reliability problems of the annotated resources, and encourages potential reexaminations of some temporal processing tasks.

La composition musicale utilise de plus en plus les outils informatiques, mais la question de l'interprétation des pièces soit résoule. Dans le cas des pièces électro-acoustiques sur support, enregistrement d'une organisation temporelle de sons, l'exécution des oeuvres se restreint à leur diffusion. A la différence des pièces instrumentales, un interprète ne peut modifier certains paramètres musicaux lors de l'exécution. Nous cherchons à définir un système de composition et d'exécution de pièces interprétables, en nous focalisant sur les modifications de dates d'événements de la partition. Nous proposons un formalisme de partitions interactives utilisant la programmation par contraintes pour définir l'organisation temporelle et les limites de l'interprétation. Nous présentons un modèle de machine abstraite pour l'exécution des partitions, basée sur les réseaux de Petri et la propagation de contraintes. Enfin, nous exposons quelques applications du système. / Abstract

The object of the present thesis is an analysis of expressions of interpropositional relations in Spanish publicistic texts with a view to temporal relations. The aim of the work is to describe all linguistic possibilities that Spanish language has for establish the temporal relations between two propositions and find out informations about their frequency. The thesis is divided in the two main parts. The first part is theoretic and presents an introduction to the concept of interpropositional relations, describes the expressions of temporal relations and tries to characterize the Spanish publicistic texts. In the second ? practical part of the thesis there are presented the above mentioned analysis and the interpretation of its results. The final part of the thesis is made by Spanish Summary.

Spatio-temporal reasoning is the area of automated reasoning about space and time and is important in the field of robotics. It is desirable for an autonomous robot to have the ability to reason about both time and space. ST0 is a logic that allows for such reasoning by, among other things, defining a formalism used to describe the relationship between spatial regions and a calculus that allows for deducing further information regarding such spatial relations. An extension of ST0 is ST1 that can be used to describe the relationship between spatial entities across time-points (inter-temporal relations) while ST0 is constrained to doing so within a single time-point. This allows for a better ability of expressing how spatial entities change over time. A major obstacle in using ST1 in practise however, is the fact that any observations made regarding spatial relations between regions is constrained to the time-point in which the observation was made, so we are unable to observe inter-temporal relations. Further complicating things is the fact that deducing such inter-temporal relations is not possible without a frame of reference. This thesis examines one method of overcoming these problems by considering the concept of rigid regions which are assumed to always be unchanging and using them as the frame of reference, or as landmarks. The effectiveness of this method is studied by conducting experiments where a comparison is made between various landmark ratios with respect to the total number of regions under consideration. Results show that when a high degree of intra-temporal relations are fully or partially known, increasing the number of landmark regions will reduce the percentage of inter-temporal relations to be completely unknown. Despite this, very few inter-temporal relations can be fully determined even with a high ratio of landmark regions.

O presente estudo tem como objetivo promover situações de aprendizagem de História em 5a. série do Ensino Fundamental. Investiga a dificuldade de compreensão dos conteúdos de História constatados pela pesquisadora em sua experiência docente e confirmados pela bibliografia consultada. As dificuldades apontadas referem-se principalmente ao estabelecimento de relações e à construção de conceitos. A metodologia adotada é a pesquisaação, em que o pesquisador tem como papel promover as situações que pretende investigar de dentro do caso. É utilizada como estratégia o estudo de caso. Os dados foram colhidos através de relatórios realizados pela professora-pesquisadora e por uma observadora externa, em sala de aula e no pequeno grupo, tomado como uma unidade incorporada, e através de trabalhos escritos pelos alunos. Parte-se do princípio que o entendimento dos conteúdos de História está estruturado sobre as noções espaço-temporais construídas pela criança, desde o nascimento. Tem-se por hipótese que a tomada de consciência das relações espaço-temporais é um caminho para uma melhor compreensão da História. Adota-se como referencial teórico a Epistemologia Genética e a teoria da Tomada de Consciência de Jean Piaget, tanto para a elaboração das situações de aprendizagem, quanto para explicar a construção das noções temporais e analisar os dados. Os resultados apontam para um entendimento de História possibilitado por uma conjugação de fatores, referentes à fase de desenvolvimento do pensamento em que a criança se encontra, às suas atuais construções temporais e sociais bem como às suas construções anteriores, viabilizadas pelas interações cognitivas e sociais. O processo de tomada de consciência provocou modificações nas ações e nas conceituações ao longo do ano, apresentando-se como um modo adequado de promover uma melhor compreensão da História. / The purpose of the present study is to promote learning situations of History in order to investigate the difficulties observed in children of the 5th degree, in this matter. The subjects were children between 10 and 17 years old, of a public school. It is an action-research that uses a case study format. The searcher was also the teacher who promotes the situations to be investigated. The data were collected through the work developped during nine month with the holly group of children and a small one, wich was part of it. It came from the report related by the searcher and an external observer. The hypotesis was that the grasp of conscience of the spatial and temporal relations permits to the children to improve the understanding of History, whereas the construction of time is the basis in wich the historical time is supported. The theoretical framework of this study came from Genetic Epistemology and the Grasp of Conscience of Jean Piaget. The study findings indicates that the understanding of History came from a conjunction of factors, like the different levels of development about the notions of time and social constructions, besides the general evolution of thought. In this search, the grasp of conscience revels success in aid children to have a better understanding of History.

O presente estudo tem como objetivo promover situações de aprendizagem de História em 5a. série do Ensino Fundamental. Investiga a dificuldade de compreensão dos conteúdos de História constatados pela pesquisadora em sua experiência docente e confirmados pela bibliografia consultada. As dificuldades apontadas referem-se principalmente ao estabelecimento de relações e à construção de conceitos. A metodologia adotada é a pesquisaação, em que o pesquisador tem como papel promover as situações que pretende investigar de dentro do caso. É utilizada como estratégia o estudo de caso. Os dados foram colhidos através de relatórios realizados pela professora-pesquisadora e por uma observadora externa, em sala de aula e no pequeno grupo, tomado como uma unidade incorporada, e através de trabalhos escritos pelos alunos. Parte-se do princípio que o entendimento dos conteúdos de História está estruturado sobre as noções espaço-temporais construídas pela criança, desde o nascimento. Tem-se por hipótese que a tomada de consciência das relações espaço-temporais é um caminho para uma melhor compreensão da História. Adota-se como referencial teórico a Epistemologia Genética e a teoria da Tomada de Consciência de Jean Piaget, tanto para a elaboração das situações de aprendizagem, quanto para explicar a construção das noções temporais e analisar os dados. Os resultados apontam para um entendimento de História possibilitado por uma conjugação de fatores, referentes à fase de desenvolvimento do pensamento em que a criança se encontra, às suas atuais construções temporais e sociais bem como às suas construções anteriores, viabilizadas pelas interações cognitivas e sociais. O processo de tomada de consciência provocou modificações nas ações e nas conceituações ao longo do ano, apresentando-se como um modo adequado de promover uma melhor compreensão da História. / The purpose of the present study is to promote learning situations of History in order to investigate the difficulties observed in children of the 5th degree, in this matter. The subjects were children between 10 and 17 years old, of a public school. It is an action-research that uses a case study format. The searcher was also the teacher who promotes the situations to be investigated. The data were collected through the work developped during nine month with the holly group of children and a small one, wich was part of it. It came from the report related by the searcher and an external observer. The hypotesis was that the grasp of conscience of the spatial and temporal relations permits to the children to improve the understanding of History, whereas the construction of time is the basis in wich the historical time is supported. The theoretical framework of this study came from Genetic Epistemology and the Grasp of Conscience of Jean Piaget. The study findings indicates that the understanding of History came from a conjunction of factors, like the different levels of development about the notions of time and social constructions, besides the general evolution of thought. In this search, the grasp of conscience revels success in aid children to have a better understanding of History.

O presente estudo tem como objetivo promover situações de aprendizagem de História em 5a. série do Ensino Fundamental. Investiga a dificuldade de compreensão dos conteúdos de História constatados pela pesquisadora em sua experiência docente e confirmados pela bibliografia consultada. As dificuldades apontadas referem-se principalmente ao estabelecimento de relações e à construção de conceitos. A metodologia adotada é a pesquisaação, em que o pesquisador tem como papel promover as situações que pretende investigar de dentro do caso. É utilizada como estratégia o estudo de caso. Os dados foram colhidos através de relatórios realizados pela professora-pesquisadora e por uma observadora externa, em sala de aula e no pequeno grupo, tomado como uma unidade incorporada, e através de trabalhos escritos pelos alunos. Parte-se do princípio que o entendimento dos conteúdos de História está estruturado sobre as noções espaço-temporais construídas pela criança, desde o nascimento. Tem-se por hipótese que a tomada de consciência das relações espaço-temporais é um caminho para uma melhor compreensão da História. Adota-se como referencial teórico a Epistemologia Genética e a teoria da Tomada de Consciência de Jean Piaget, tanto para a elaboração das situações de aprendizagem, quanto para explicar a construção das noções temporais e analisar os dados. Os resultados apontam para um entendimento de História possibilitado por uma conjugação de fatores, referentes à fase de desenvolvimento do pensamento em que a criança se encontra, às suas atuais construções temporais e sociais bem como às suas construções anteriores, viabilizadas pelas interações cognitivas e sociais. O processo de tomada de consciência provocou modificações nas ações e nas conceituações ao longo do ano, apresentando-se como um modo adequado de promover uma melhor compreensão da História. / The purpose of the present study is to promote learning situations of History in order to investigate the difficulties observed in children of the 5th degree, in this matter. The subjects were children between 10 and 17 years old, of a public school. It is an action-research that uses a case study format. The searcher was also the teacher who promotes the situations to be investigated. The data were collected through the work developped during nine month with the holly group of children and a small one, wich was part of it. It came from the report related by the searcher and an external observer. The hypotesis was that the grasp of conscience of the spatial and temporal relations permits to the children to improve the understanding of History, whereas the construction of time is the basis in wich the historical time is supported. The theoretical framework of this study came from Genetic Epistemology and the Grasp of Conscience of Jean Piaget. The study findings indicates that the understanding of History came from a conjunction of factors, like the different levels of development about the notions of time and social constructions, besides the general evolution of thought. In this search, the grasp of conscience revels success in aid children to have a better understanding of History.

Les relations spatiales entre les différentes régions dans une image sont utiles pour la compréhension et l'interprétation de la scène représentée. L'analyse Spatio-temporelle d'une scène implique l'intégration du temps dans des relations spatiales entre les objets en mouvement. Les relations spatio-temporelles sont définies dans un intervalle de temps utilisant la géométrie 3D ou l'extension de la géométrie 2D à la dimension temporelle. La modélisation des relations spatiales dynamiques prend en compte la position relative des objets et leurs relations directionnelles, ceci implique les relations topologiques, directionnelles et de distance. Ces relations sont étendues au domaine temporel. Dans notre travail, on décrit une méthode de combinaison d’information topologique et directionnelle où les relations d'Allen floues 1D sont appliquées au domaine spatial. La méthode proposée intègre le flou au niveau des relations. La méthode très gourmande initialement en temps de calcul en raison de l’approximation des objets ainsi qu'à l'algorithme de fuzzification des segments des sections longitudinales est améliorée en utilisant une approximation polygonale adaptée sur les objets considérés. L'algorithme du fuzzification des segments d'une section longitudinale inclut des opérateurs d'agrégation floue. Dans la méthode proposée, Les relations topologiques 2Dsont représentées par un histogramme. Les relations floues n'étant pas exhaustives, un algorithme de défuzzification des relations spatiales a été proposé pour réaliser un ensemble JEPD de relations spatiales. Cet ensemble de relations spatiales est représenté par un graphe de voisinage où chaque nœud du graphe représente la relation topologique et directionnelle. Cette méthode définit des relations spatio-temporelles en utilisant le modèle de données Espace-Temps. Un ensemble de relations spatio-temporelles est également fourni à l'aide de la stabilité topologique. Afin de valider le modèle, nous avons développé des applications fondées sur le raisonnement spatio-temporel proposé. Celui-ci a permit la création de tables de composition pour les relations spatiales topologiques structurées en sous-tables. Les entités de ces sous-tables sont liées les unes aux autres par des relations spatiales. Dans une seconde application, nous avons proposé une méthode de prédiction des évènements entre objets en mouvement fondée sur le même raisonnement spatio-temporel. Les objets en mouvement changeant de position à chaque instant, la prédiction de la nouvelle position spatiale d'un objet tient compte des états de relations spatiales calculées précédemment. / Spatial relations between different image regions are helpful in image understanding, interpretation and computer vision applications. Spatio-temporal analysis involves the integration of spatial relations changing over time between moving objects of a dynamic scene. Spatio-temporal relations are defined for a selected time interval using 3D geometry or extension of 2D object geometry to the time dimension with sequence occurrence of primitive events for each snapshot. Modeling dynamic spatial relations takes into account the relative object position and their directional relations; this involves the topological, directional and distance relations and their logical extension to the temporal domain. In this thesis, a method for combining topological and directional relations information is discussed where 1D temporal fuzzy Allen relations are applied in spatial domain. Initially, the method has a high computational cost. This computing cost is due to the object approximation and the fuzzification algorithm of segments. The computing time has been using polygonal object approximation. Fuzzification algorithm is replaced with fuzzy aggregation operators for segments of a longitudinal section. In this method, two dimensional topological relations are represented in a histogram. The representation method for two dimensional spatial relations has been changed. These fuzzy relations are not Jointly Exhaustive and Pairwise Disjoint (JEPD). An algorithm for defuzzification of spatial relations is proposed to realize JEPD set of spatial relations, these JEPD spatial relations are represented in a neighborhood graph. In this neighborhood graph, each node represents the topological and directional relation. This method is further extended for defining spatio-temporal relations using space and time data model, a set of spatio-temporal relations are also elaborated using the stability property in topology. In an application, a method for spatio-temporal reasoning based on this new model is developed. Spatio-temporal reasoning consists of developing the composition tables for spatial relations. Composition table for topological relations are rearranged into sub-tables. Entities in these sub-tables are related to each other and mathematical rules are defined for composition of spatial relations which elaborate the relation between entities of sub-tables. In another application, we propose a method for motion event predictions between moving objects. It is a similar process to the spatio-temporal reasoning. Dynamic objects occupy different places at different time points, these objects have multiple choices for subsequent positions and a unique history. Prediction about motion events take into account the history of a moving object and predict about the semantics of a motion event.