What is the Temporal Value of Web Snippets?

Abstract

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a huge information network from which retrieving and organizing quality relevant content remains an open question for mostly all implicit temporal queries, i.e., queries without any date but with an underlying temporal intent. In this research, we aim at studying the temporal nature of any given query by means of web snippets or web query logs. For that purpose, we conducted a set of experiments, which goal is to assess the percentage of web snippets or queries (in query logs) having temporal features, thus checking whether they are a valuable source of data to help on inferring the temporal intent of queries, namely implicit ones. Our results show that web snippets, as opposed to web query logs, are an important source of concentrated information, where time clues often appear. As a consequence, they can be particularly useful to identify and understand 'on-the-fly' the implicit temporal nature of queries in the context of ephemeral clustering.