Abstract: Concerning the problem with the recognition and normalization of time expressions in texts, aiming at the diversity and unstructured forms of time expressions, it proposed the idea of describing temporal elements to divide the types of time expressions and their forms of normalization. With the method that combined regular expressions with Trie tree structure, it built the recognition tree of time expressions, which could recognize time expressions automatically. Finally, it proposed the normalization algorithm and correction algorithm to deal with the recognized results. The results are pretty good.