Classifying Dominant Temporal Orientation without Pretrained Text Embeddings: A Novel Morphosyntactic Inventory Vector Approach

Jonathan Cleveland, Peter S. Bearman

Computational methods have consistently struggled to determine the dominant temporal orientation of a sentence. This difficulty is especially pronounced when a sentence contains multiple embedded clauses with competing tense and aspectual information. To address this difficulty, we propose an alternative approach for identifying a sentence's past, present, or future global reference interval. Our method does not use any form of pretrained embeddings. We rather encode sentences using fixed-length inventory vectors that are comprised of part-of-speech counts, dependency relation counts, and explicit futurate pattern counts. We term this inventory vector of a sentence a "Morphosyntacton". The method does not use any padding, sequence models, or large language models. Evaluation on 1,799 syntactically complex English sentences, annotated as past, present or future, shows balanced and high accuracy multiclass classification, achieving an overall multi-class accuracy of 92%.