Temporal Information Retrieval (TIR) at CLEF LongEval 2024
Information Retrieval (IR) systems are exposed to constant change. The user queries vary in type and quantity, the media that is searched changes, and even what is today considered relevant might not be anymore tomorrow. Temporal Information Retrieval (TIR) factors these time-dependent features to improve the effectiveness of an IR system. For example, by directly considering the “freshness” of a webpage as a relevance indicator or by extracting the temporal intention of a query to narrow down the result candidates.
CLEF (Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum) is an information retrieval conference where specific problem definitions and evaluation datasets are presented for (groups of) people to work on and try to solve the task. In 2024, the CLEF will host the LongEval shared task, which targets the problem of temporal persistence of retrieval systems.
In this thesis project, you could try to develop a retrieval system that takes the temporal dynamics of web search into account. Further, the system could be submitted to the CLEF LongEval shared task.
Relevant Literature and Links
- LongEval Shared Task: https://clef-longeval.github.io
- Dumais, S. (2012). Temporal dynamics and information retrieval (SIAM-SDM 2012, Keynote Talk). https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/temporal-dynamics-information-retrieval/
- Kanhabua, N., Blanco, R., & Nørvåg, K. (2015). Temporal information retrieval. Found. Trends Inf. Retr., 9(2), 91–208. https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000043
- Joho, H., Jatowt, A., Blanco, R., Naka, H., & Yamamoto, S. (2014). Overview of NTCIR-11 temporal information access (temporalia) task. In N. Kando, H. Joho, & K. Kishida (Hrsg.), Proceedings of the 11th NTCIR conference on evaluation of information access technologies, NTCIR-11, national center of sciences, tokyo, japan, december 9-12, 2014. National Institute of Informatics (NII). http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/workshop/OnlineProceedings11/pdf/NTCIR/OVERVIEW/01-NTCIR11-OV-TEMPORALIA-JohoH.pdf
- Willis, C., Sherman, G., & Efron, M. (2016). What makes a query temporally sensitive? Proceedings of the 39th international ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in information retrieval, 1065–1068. https://doi.org/10.1145/2911451.2914703