Temporal analysis of CHAVE collection

Abstract

The importance of temporal information (TI) is increasing in several Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. CHAVE, available from Linguateca’s site, is the only ad hoc IR test collection with Portuguese texts. So, the research question of this work is whether this collection is sufficiently rich to be used in Temporal IR evaluation. The obtained answer was yes. By the analysis of the CHAVE collection, we verified that 22% of the topics and 86% of the documents have at least one chronon. 49% of topics are time-sensitive. Analyzing the relation of topics with documents, relevant documents of time-sensitive topics converge to a specific date(s), while the non-relevant ones are dispersed along the timeline. Finally, we used a peak dates strategy as a time-aware query expansion (QE) process. Experiments showed effectiveness improvements for time-sensitive queries.