Interval relations in lexical semantics of verbs

Numerous temporal relations of verbal actions have been analysed in terms of various grammatical means of expressing verbal temporalisation such as tense, aspect,duration and iteration. Here the temporal relations within verb semantics, particularly ordered pairs of verb entailment, are studied using Allen’s interval-based temporal formalism. Their application to the compositional visual definitions in our intelligent storytelling system, CONFUCIUS, is presented, including the representation of procedural events, achievement events and lexical causatives. In applying these methods we consider both language modalities and visual modalities since CONFUCIUS is a multimodal system.