The goal of this dissertation, thus, is to automatically populate knowledge bases with this kind of temporal knowledge. The dissertation makes the following contributions to address the afore mentioned limitations. The first contribution is a method for extracting events from news articles. The method reconciles the extracted events into canonicalized representations and organizes them into fine-grained semantic classes. The second contribution is a method for mining the textual phrases denoting the events and facts. The method infers the temporal scopes of these phrases and maps them to a knowledge base.
Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that our methods yield high quality output compared to state-of- the-art approaches, and can indeed populate knowledge bases with temporal knowledge.