{"id":5243,"date":"2011-04-26T07:19:21","date_gmt":"2011-04-26T14:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=5243"},"modified":"2011-04-25T19:57:29","modified_gmt":"2011-04-26T02:57:29","slug":"how-much-does-time-weigh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=5243","title":{"rendered":"How much does time weigh?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Miles<\/a> wrote<\/a> yesterday, our paper<\/a> was accepted to SIGIR 2011. The idea that time has an impact in ranking documents is not new; the problem seems to be to know when to take it into consideration. For example, while Li and Croft<\/a> showed improvements in ranking when incorporating the notion of recency, we found that the algorithm degrades performance of non-temporal queries. (This is obvious, in a sense: if a ranking algorithm is biased toward more recent documents, and recency is not important for a given query, it will de-emphasize otherwise well-matching documents, thereby reducing MAP.)<\/p>\n

One of the contributions of our work, then, is to estimate whether a particular query is sensitive to time, and to apply temporal smoothing only when the query is likely to benefit from this. The approach yielded improvements in performance of temporal queries without compromising other kinds of queries. Of course the algorithm isn’t perfect, because it cannot divine the user’s intent. For interactive information seeking, therefore, it probably makes sense to give the user control over how much importance to assign to recency. Several ways of incorporating this input come to mind:<\/p>\n