TimIR: Time-Traveling Through IR History

Moritz Staudinger, Wojciech Kusa, Florina Piroi, Andreas Rauber, Allan Hanbury

Abstract: In live systems, where the underlying document corpora evolve frequently, a query executed at two different points in time can yield two different result sets. Although not important in traditional web search settings, domains, such as patent retrieval or systematic literature reviews, rely on the time of execution to obtain the relevant result set. To ensure reproducibility and auditability of their search results researchers in these fields usually rely on Boolean Retrieval. This is because sparse and dense retrieval methods do not satisfy this requirement, as sparse retrieval relies on global term and document statistics, and dense retrieval relies on document embeddings. These values and vectors are subject to change if the document corpora are updated and therefore change the ranking as well.

External IDs:dblp:conf/ecir/StaudingerKPRH25