Determining Time of Queries for Re-ranking Search Results

Recent work on analyzing query logs shows that a significant fraction of queries are temporal, i.e., relevancy is dependent on time, and temporal queries play an important role in many domains, e.g., digital libraries and document archives. Temporal queries can be divided into two types: 1) those with temporal criteria explicitly provided by users, and 2) those with no temporal criteria provided. In this paper, we deal with the latter type of queries, i.e., queries that comprise only keywords, and their relevant documents are associated to particular time periods not given by the queries. We propose a number of methods to determine the time of queries using temporal language models. After that, we show how to increase the retrieval effectiveness by using the determined time of queries to re-rank the search results. Through extensive experiments we show that our proposed approaches improve retrieval effectiveness.