Tense use in dialogue

This paper reports on parallel corpus research
that shows that there are differences in tense
use in written texts between parts that represent dialogue, and parts that narrate the story.
This calls for further study of tense use in dialogue, both in written representations, and in
spoken dialogue. Yet, in the dialogue semantics literature almost no prior work exists that
is devoted to tense use, neither from a formal,
nor from a computational angle. We argue that
this gap in dialogue research should be filled
by further empirical investigation, as well as
the development of computational tools for
automated annotation of tense and temporal
structure in dialogue. This will not only help
understand how speakers track the temporal
structure of dialogue, but also give theoretical
linguistic literature on tense a wider empirical
and computational dimension.