Abstract
Ordering events with temporal relations in texts remains a challenge in natural language processing. In this paper, we introduce a new combined neural network architecture that is capable of classifying temporal relations between events in an Arabic sentence. Our model consists of two branches: the first one extracts the syntactic information and identifies the orientation of the relation between the two given events based on a Shortest Dependency Path (SDP) layer with Long and Short Memory (LSTM), and the second one encourages the model to focus on the important local information when learning sentence representations based on a Bidirectional-LSTM (BiLSTM) attention layer. The experiments suggest that our proposed model outperforms several previous state-of-the-art methods, with an F1-score equal to 86.40%.