Using k-top Retrieved Web Snippets to Date Temporal Implicit Queries based on Web Content Analysis

Abstract

Temporal Information Retrieval (T-IR) has been a topic of great interest in recent years. Its purpose is to improve the information retrieval of documents by exploiting temporal information. However and despite the relative maturity of the area and an increasing involvement of the IR community in recent years, few works have fully used temporal information for exploration and search purposes [1], causing many queries not to be inferred by search engines. Such a lack lies in the fact that the used retrieval models continue to represent documents and queries simplistically, ignoring the underlying temporal semantics. Inferring the user intentions and the period he has in mind, may therefore play an extremely important role in the retrieval of the results. Our work goes in this direction. We aim at introducing a temporal analysis framework for analyzing documents in a temporal dimension in order to identify and understand the temporal nature of any given query, namely implicit ones (e.g.,