  Aspectual meaning refers to how the internal temporal structure of situations
is presented. This includes whether a situation is described as a state or as
an event, whether the situation is finished or ongoing, and whether it is
viewed as a whole or with a focus on a particular phase. This survey gives an
overview of computational approaches to modeling lexical and grammatical aspect
along with intuitive explanations of the necessary linguistic concepts and
terminology. In particular, we describe the concepts of stativity, telicity,
habituality, perfective and imperfective, as well as influential inventories of
eventuality and situation types. We argue that because aspect is a crucial
component of semantics, especially when it comes to reporting the temporal
structure of situations in a precise way, future NLP approaches need to be able
to handle and evaluate it systematically in order to achieve human-level
language understanding.
