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Abstract:
Getting an overview of a historic entity or event can be difficult in search results, especially if important dates concerning the entity or event are not known beforehand. For such information needs, users would benefit if returned results covered diverse dates, thus giving an overview of what has happened throughout history. Diversifying search results based on important dates can be a building block for applications, for instance, in digital humanities. Historians would thus be able to quickly explore
longitudinal document collections by querying for entities or events without knowing associated important dates apriori.
In this work, we describe an approach to diversify search results using temporal expressions (e.g., in the 1990s) from their
contents. Our approach first identifies time intervals of interest to the given keyword query based on pseudo-relevant documents. It then re-ranks query results so as to maximize the coverage of
identified time intervals. We present a novel and objective evaluation for our proposed
approach. We test the effectiveness of our methods on the New York Times Annotated corpus and the Living Knowledge corpus, collectively consisting of around 6 million documents. Using history-oriented queries and encyclopedic resources we show that our method indeed is able to present
search results diversified along time.
