The facts and time in the document are intricately intertwined, making temporal reasoning over documents challenging. Previous work models time implicitly, making it difficult to handle such complex relationships. To address this issue, we propose MTGER, a novel Multi-view Temporal Graph Enhanced Reasoning framework for temporal reasoning over time-involved documents. Concretely, MTGER explicitly models the temporal relationships among facts by multi-view temporal graphs. On the one hand, the heterogeneous temporal graphs explicitly model the temporal and discourse relationships among facts; on the other hand, the multi-view mechanism captures both time-focused and fact-focused information, allowing the two views to complement each other through adaptive fusion. To further improve the implicit reasoning capability of the model, we design a self-supervised time-comparing objective. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the TimeQA and SituatedQA datasets. Furthermore, MTGER gives more consistent answers under question perturbations.

The same multi-word expressions may have different meanings in different sentences. They can be mainly divided into two categories, which are literal meaning and idiomatic meaning. Non-contextual-based methods perform poorly on this problem, and we need contextual embedding to understand the idiomatic meaning of multi-word expressions correctly. We use a pre-trained language model, which can provide a context-aware sentence embedding, to detect whether multi-word expression in the sentence is idiomatic usage.