Temporal reasoning: A three way analysis

Abstract

The study of temporal representation and reasoning is a core area of research in linguistics, philosophy and artificial intelligence. However, very little work has been done in analysing the principles common to these three areas. We investigate major issues and approaches studied in these disciplines. We discovered the philosophical origin of Allen's (1983; 1984) interval algebra. We present an analysis of major issues and approaches proposed in these areas to handle temporal representations. Further, a variant of neighbourhood logic, neighbourhood end-point model (NEPM) is proposed. It is shown that the disjunctive normal neighborhood logic form (DNNLF) of NEPM provides an elegant interpretation for the tautologyhood of Allen's interval relations. We expect NEPM to be further developed for unifying temporal reasoning approaches proposed in linguistics, philosophy and artificial intelligence.