Looking for the Bottleneck in Fine-grained Temporal Relation Classification
sigir26-057 · Full research paper · Hugo Sousa, Ricardo Campos, Alípio Jorge
Language Model Pre-training and Adap · 100%
Abstract
Temporal relation classification is the task of determining the temporal relation between pairs of temporal entities in a text. Despite recent advancements in natural language processing, temporal relation classification remains a considerable challenge. Early attempts framed this task using a comprehensive set of temporal relations between events and temporal expressions. However, due to the task complexity, datasets have been progressively simplified, leading recent approaches to focus on the relations between event pairs and to use only a subset of relations. In this work, we revisit the broader goal of classifying interval relations between temporal entities by considering the full set of relations that can hold between two time intervals. The proposed approach, Interval from Point, involves first classifying the point relations between the endpoints of the temporal entities and then decoding these point relations into an interval relation. Evaluation on the TempEval-3 dataset shows that this approach can yield effective results, achieving a temporal awareness score of 70.1 percent, a new state-of-the-art on this benchmark.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weipeng Chen | 62 | 100 Exploring Context Window of Large Language Models via Decomposed Positional Vectors (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 DataSculpt: A Holistic Data Management Framework for Long-Context LLMs Training (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 SysBench: Can LLMs Follow System Message? (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 2 | Di Wu 0054 | 57 | 100 Active Instruction Tuning: Improving Cross-Task Generalization by Training on Prompt Sensitive Tasks (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Rethinking Model Selection and Decoding for Keyphrase Generation with Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Models (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 On Leveraging Encoder-only Pre-trained Language Models for Effective Keyphrase Generation (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 3 | Xi Ye 0003 | 56 | 100 The Unreliability of Explanations in Few-shot Prompting for Textual Reasoning (2022) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Assessing Out-of-Domain Language Model Performance from Few Examples (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 LoFiT: Localized Fine-tuning on LLM Representations (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Xiaoye Qu | 49 |
Area-chair candidates (3)
| Xiaoye Qu assigned | 49 | 15 papers | |
| Yi R. Fung 0001 | 39 | 10 papers | |
| Xiaoyi Zeng | 33 | 11 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weipeng Chen assigned | 62 | 3 | 100 Exploring Context Window of Large Language Models via Decomposed Positional Vectors (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 DataSculpt: A Holistic Data Management Framework for Long-Context LLMs Training (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 2 | Di Wu 0054 assigned | 57 | 3 | 100 Active Instruction Tuning: Improving Cross-Task Generalization by Training on Prompt Sensitive Tasks (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Rethinking Model Selection and Decoding for Keyphrase Generation with Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Models (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 3 | Xi Ye 0003 assigned | 56 | 3 | 100 The Unreliability of Explanations in Few-shot Prompting for Textual Reasoning (2022) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Assessing Out-of-Domain Language Model Performance from Few Examples (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 5 | Huiqiang Jiang | 45 | 3 | 100 Decomposed Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Chain-of-Model Learning for Language Model (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 6 | Ori Yoran | 44 | 3 | 100 Evaluating the Ripple Effects of Knowledge Editing in Language Models (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 LMEnt: A Suite for Analyzing Knowledge in Language Models from Pretraining Data to Representations (2026) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 7 | Yanzhao Zhang | 42 | 3 | 100 Unsupervised Boundary-Aware Language Model Pretraining for Chinese Sequence Labeling (2022) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Chinese Sequence Labeling with Semi-Supervised Boundary-Aware Language Model Pre-training (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 8 | Weiwei Sun 0001 | 41 | 3 | 100 How Large Language Models Encode Context Knowledge? A Layer-Wise Probing Study (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 9 | Archiki Prasad | 40 | 3 | 100 GrIPS: Gradient-free, Edit-based Instruction Search for Prompting Large Language Models (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Multi-Attribute Steering of Language Models via Targeted Intervention (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 11 | Haiyang Xu 0001 | 38 | 3 | 100 Exploiting Presentative Feature Distributions for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 43 TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Program-of-Thoughts Learning and Visual Token Merging (2024) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks |
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| 12 | Dan Luo 0004 | 38 | 3 | 100 Mitigating Language Confusion through Inference-time Intervention (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 62 From Anchors to Answers: A Novel Node Tokenizer for Integrating Graph Structure into Large Language Models (2025) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
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| 13 | Kaixin Ma | 38 | 3 | 100 Transferring Procedural Knowledge Across Commonsense Tasks (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Exploring Strategies for Generalizable Commonsense Reasoning with Pre-trained Models (2021) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 14 | Venktesh V | 37 | 3 | 100 Topic Aware Contextualized Embeddings for High Quality Phrase Extraction (2022) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 Sample Efficient Demonstration Selection for In-Context Learning (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 15 | Xinying Qian | 37 | 3 | 100 Grow-on-Demand: Sparse and Adaptive Expert Expansion for Continual Instruction Tuning (2026) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 38 SMIR: Span-based multi-grained information refinement for joint multimodal entity-relation extraction (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 16 | Junjie Zhang 0009 | 36 | 3 | 100 A Survey of Large Language Models (2026) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 63 A Pre-trained Plug-in Mixture-of-LoRAs Model for Transferable Sequential Recommendation (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 17 | Haokun Wen | 36 | 3 | 38 ENCODER: Entity Mining and Modification Relation Binding for Composed Image Retrieval (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 38 A Comprehensive Survey on Composed Image Retrieval (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 18 | Zihao Yue | 35 | 3 | 43 ChartM3: Benchmarking Chart Editing with Multimodal Instructions (2025) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks 43 Learning Descriptive Image Captioning via Semipermeable Maximum Likelihood Estimation (2023) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks |
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| 19 | Jinheon Baek | 35 | 3 | 100 System Prompt Optimization with Meta-Learning (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 62 KALA: Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Adaptation (2022) KG-Augmented LLM Reasoning |
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| 20 | Farima Fatahi Bayat | 35 | 3 | 100 CompactIE: Compact Facts in Open Information Extraction (2022) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 23 From Proof to Program: Characterizing Tool-Induced Reasoning Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2026) Reward Modeling and Process Supervision |
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| 21 | Adam Jatowt COI: co-author | 35 | 3 | 100 Towards Effective Time-Aware Language Representation: Exploring Enhanced Temporal Understanding in Language Models (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 100 BiTimeBERT: Extending Pre-Trained Language Representations with Bi-Temporal Information (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 22 | Shuaiqiang Wang | 34 | 3 | 66 S2phere: Semi-Supervised Pre-training for Web Search over Heterogeneous Learning to Rank Data (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 66 RankElectra: Semi-supervised Pre-training of Learning-to-Rank Electra for Web-scale Search (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 23 | Lichan Hong | 34 | 3 | 66 Improving Data Efficiency for Recommenders and LLMs (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 36 Better Generalization with Semantic IDs: A Case Study in Ranking for Recommendations (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 24 | Minghui Fang 0002 | 33 | 3 | 38 CART: A Generative Cross-Modal Retrieval Framework With Coarse-To-Fine Semantic Modeling (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 38 Open-Set Cross Modal Generalization via Multimodal Unified Representation (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 25 | Hao Liu 0078 | 33 | 3 | 38 Mitigating Fine-tuning Bias: A Parameter-Efficient Debiasing Framework for Large Language Models (2026) Bias Mitigation Methods 37 DA-DAN: A Dual Adversarial Domain Adaption Network for Unsupervised Non-overlapping Cross-domain Recommendation (2024) Domain Adaptation and Disentangled Representation for CDR |
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| 26 | Yang Zhang 0072 | 33 | 3 | 43 Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization (2025) Personalized LLM Adaptation 39 Don't Start Over: A Cost-Effective Framework for Migrating Personalized Prompts Between LLMs (2026) Efficiency and Deployment |
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| 27 | Ed H. Chi | 33 | 3 | 66 Improving Data Efficiency for Recommenders and LLMs (2024) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 36 Better Generalization with Semantic IDs: A Case Study in Ranking for Recommendations (2024) Item Tokenization and Semantic IDs |
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| 29 | Corby Rosset | 33 | 3 | 67 Axiomatic Preference Modeling for Longform Question Answering (2023) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA 65 Dodo: Dynamic Contextual Compression for Decoder-only LMs (2024) Learned Sparse Retrieval Efficiency |
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| 30 | Qisheng Hu | 33 | 3 | 100 STARE at the Structure: Steering ICL Exemplar Selection with Structural Alignment (2025) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 25 Just What You Desire: Constrained Timeline Summarization with Self-Reflection for Enhanced Relevance (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA |
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| 31 | Xinyu Ma 0001 | 33 | 3 | 37 Pre-train a Discriminative Text Encoder for Dense Retrieval via Contrastive Span Prediction (2022) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders 37 A Contrastive Pre-training Approach to Discriminative Autoencoder for Dense Retrieval (2022) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders |
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| 32 | Ruqing Zhang 0001 | 33 | 3 | 37 PROP: Pre-training with Representative Words Prediction for Ad-hoc Retrieval (2021) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders 37 B-PROP: Bootstrapped Pre-training with Representative Words Prediction for Ad-hoc Retrieval (2021) Sparse and Dense Retrieval Encoders |
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| 33 | Shengyao Zhuang | 33 | 3 | 43 A Setwise Approach for Effective and Highly Efficient Zero-shot Ranking with Large Language Models (2024) LLM-Based Reranking 43 Where Relevance Emerges: A Layer-Wise Study of Internal Attention for Zero-Shot Re-Ranking (2026) LLM-Based Reranking |