Relation, Event, and Temporal Extraction › Worked Example: One Paragraph, Four Selected Events

Let's work through a small example with rule extraction, reference heuristics, normalization, and grounding checks. Here is the document:

Acme Corp announced on 3 March 2019 that it had acquired Bolt Systems for $120 million. The deal closed two weeks later. Acme's chief executive, Jane Ruiz, said the acquisition would expand the company's cloud business. Bolt Systems, founded in 2011 by Sam Okafor, employed about 40 people at the time.

For this example, assume the article was created and published on 2019-03-25. For this worked interpretation, resolve "two weeks later" relative to the explicitly dated announcement on 3 March, giving a closing on 17 March. In Acme’s account, the past perfect places the acquisition before the announcement without dating it exactly. We keep that reported acquisition separate from the closing described in the next sentence. The passage gives no independent date for a legal transfer of ownership.

The example contains relations, event-valued arguments, a relative time expression, a year-granularity time, a pronoun, an alias, and a document creation time. Write the expected records by hand before comparing them with the rules below.

Step 1: named mentions. Acme Corp (ORG), 3 March 2019 (DATE), Bolt Systems (ORG), $120 million (MONEY), two weeks later (DATE), Acme (ORG), Jane Ruiz (PERSON), a second Bolt Systems mention (ORG), 2011 (DATE), Sam Okafor (PERSON), and about 40 (CARDINAL). The referring expressions "it", "The deal", "the acquisition", and "the company" are absent from this named-entity list. They still participate in reference decisions.

Step 2: candidate relations.

• (Acme Corp, acquire, Bolt Systems) is the acquisition described in the report "Acme Corp announced on 3 March 2019 that it had acquired Bolt Systems". The reporting clause names Acme Corp and supplies the antecedent of "it". Carry that evidence and the attribution to Acme with the candidate if you use it in an acquisition record. In this example the acquisition has status=reported_complete and claim_source=Acme Corp. If the sentence instead said "Acme Corp announced it intended to acquire Bolt Systems", the same buyer and target would have status=reported_intent and claim_source=Acme Corp. The status describes what Acme reported.
• (Jane Ruiz, chief_executive_of, Acme), from the appositive-possessive construction "Acme's chief executive, Jane Ruiz". The organization tail is "Acme", not "Acme Corp"; linking the alias lets these references share an identifier.
• (Sam Okafor, founder_of, Bolt Systems), from the reduced passive relative clause "founded in 2011 by Sam Okafor".

Step 3: selected events. We retain four records below. E1 is the dated announcement, rather than the earlier acquisition. The acquisition remains the content of that announcement and the deal referred to by E2; its exact date is unknown. This selected table is not an exhaustive event-mention annotation.

Four points worth noticing:

1. E2's argument is an event. "The deal" refers to the acquisition, not to E1's announcement. A record can refer to another event even when that event is not expanded into a separate row in this selected table.
2. E3 has year-level localization. Its date lies within 2011; the text does not say that founding lasted a year.
3. E4 has no exact date. Under the worked simple-past reading, Jane Ruiz spoke before the narration. This ordering leaves her exact day unknown.
4. The past perfect matters. "Had acquired" locates the acquisition before the dated announcement. Assigning 3 March as its exact date asserts precision the sentence does not supply. Collapsing both events to the same date-point without preserving their before relation would lose that precedence distinction.

Step 4: temporal relations.

• E3 before E1 (2011 well before 2019-03-03)
• E1 before E2 (announcement precedes closing)
• E3 before E2 (the founding year precedes the closing date)
• The date-only comparisons leave all three pairs involving E4 undetermined. They use the stored date fields and omit the separate tense-derived ordering relative to narration.

Deriving E2's time is where the anchoring machinery earns its keep. For the worked reading, "two weeks later" is anchored to the announcement:

$$t_{E2} = t_{E1} + 14\ \text{days} = 2019\text{-}03\text{-}03 + 14 = 2019\text{-}03\text{-}17$$

If we had anchored "two weeks later" to the document creation time (2019-03-25), we would get 2019-04-08, which is wrong by 22 days and would place the closing after the article was published, an obvious contradiction that a consistency check should flag.

The contradiction depends on factuality: this paragraph describes the closing as completed before publication. A future date would be legitimate for an announced plan or prediction. Check event status and evidence before treating a date after publication as an error.