Natural (language) temporal logic: Reasoning about absolute and relative time

A novel temporal reasoner whose representational, inferential, and computational characteristics closely resemble natural language is presented. It demonstrates that important inferences about time can be captured by a general representation and reasoning mechanism inherent in natural language, many aspects of which are closely mimicked by the proposed Boolean algebra computational model of natural language. As the result, a uniform representation and inference, and therefore a simple architecture, for temporal and non-temporal reasoning is accomplished. It is also shown that computing logical, context-independent and some non-monotonic, context-dependent inferences for temporal and non-temporal objects is almost exactly analogous. Real-life examples illustrate novel representational and reasoning capabilities of the proposed natural language style temporal reasoner, including many previously unaccounted aspects of temporal information conveyed by common English temporal expression, reasoning with information from arbitrary Boolean temporal expressions involving explicit negation, disjunction and conjunction, handling temporal quantifiers, handling infinite number of temporal relations, handling both absolute and relative temporal information, and handling non-numeric qualitative temporal information.