Time-based language models

  • Authors:
  • Xiaoyan Li;W. Bruce Croft

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts, MA;University of Massachusetts, MA

  • Venue:
  • CIKM '03 Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We explore the relationship between time and relevance using TREC ad-hoc queries. A type of query is identified that favors very recent documents. We propose a time-based language model approach to retrieval for these queries. We show how time can be incorporated into both query-likelihood models and relevance models. These models were used for experiments comparing time-based language models to heuristic techniques for incorporating document recency in the ranking. Our results show that time-based models perform as well as or better than the best of the heuristic techniques.