Survey of Temporal Information Retrieval and Related Applications

Abstract

Temporal information retrieval has been a topic of great interest in recent years. Its purpose is to improve the effectiveness of information retrieval methods by exploiting temporal information in documents and queries. In this article, we present a survey of the existing literature on temporal information retrieval. In addition to giving an overview of the field, we categorize the relevant research, describe the main contributions, and compare different approaches. We organize existing research to provide a coherent view, discuss several open issues, and point out some possible future research directions in this area. Despite significant advances, the area lacks a systematic arrangement of prior efforts and an overview of state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, an effective end-to-end temporal retrieval system that exploits temporal information to improve the quality of the presented results remains undeveloped.