Discovering temporal relationships in databases of newspapers

This paper is mainly dedicated to analyse the problem of discovering frequent temporal patterns in event sequences extracted from a large repository of newspapers. The proposed formalism and algorithms rely on Toodor, which is a document retrieval system that allows users to specify conditions over the structure, contents and temporal features of the stored documents. We develop in this work several algorithms for recognising frequent temporal patterns in terms of arc-consistency, which consist of discarding temporal occurrences that do not satisfy a temporal structure.