Reasoning on aspectual-temporal information in French within conceptual graphs

This paper presents a modeling of time, aspect and verbal meanings in natural language processing within Simple Conceptual Graphs (SCG) by way of Semantico-Cognitive Schemes (SCS) and the aspectual-temporal theory. Our system translates a semantico-cognitive representation in terms of SCGs. The SCS allows us to build a representation of a text taking into account fine subtleties of natural language as the information about time and aspect. The Conceptual Graphs formalism provides a powerful inferential mechanism which makes it possible to reason from texts. Our work bears on French texts. A text is represented by two different structures both represented within the SCG model. The first structure models the semantico-cognitive representation while the second one is the temporal diagram representing the temporal constraints between the situations described in the text. Linking these structures entails an expansion of the original SCG model.