Identification of top relevant temporal expressions in documents

Abstract

Temporal information is very common in textual documents, and thus, identifying, normalizing, and organizing temporal expressions is an important task in IR. Although there are some tools for temporal tagging, there is a lack in research focusing on the relevance of temporal expressions. Besides counting their frequency and verifying whether they satisfy a temporal search query, temporal expressions are often considered in isolation only. There are no methods to calculate the relevance of temporal expressions, neither in general nor with respect to a query. In this paper, we present an approach to identify top relevant temporal expressions in documents using expression-, document-, corpus-, and query-based features. We present two relevance functions: one to calculate relevance scores for temporal expressions in general, and one with respect to a search query, which consists of a textual part, a temporal part, or both. Using two evaluation scenarios, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.