  Texts in natural language contain a lot of temporal information, both
explicit and implicit. Verbs and temporal adjuncts carry most of the explicit
information, but for a full understanding general world knowledge and default
assumptions have to be taken into account. We will present a theory for
describing the relation between, on the one hand, verbs, their tenses and
adjuncts and, on the other, the eventualities and periods of time they
represent and their relative temporal locations, while allowing interaction
with general world knowledge.
  The theory is formulated in an extension of first order logic and is a
practical implementation of the concepts described in Van Eynde 2001 and
Schelkens et al. 2000. We will show how an abductive resolution procedure can
be used on this representation to extract temporal information from texts. The
theory presented here is an extension of that in Verdoolaege et al. 2000,
adapted to VanEynde 2001, with a simplified and extended analysis of adjuncts
and with more emphasis on how a model can be constructed.
