TempRetriever: Fusion-based Temporal Dense Passage Retrieval for Time-Sensitive Questions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Abdallah, Abdelrahman, Piryani, Bhawna, Wallat, Jonas, Anand, Avishek, Jatowt, Adam
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Abdallah, Abdelrahman
Piryani, Bhawna
Wallat, Jonas
Anand, Avishek
Jatowt, Adam
author_facet Abdallah, Abdelrahman
Piryani, Bhawna
Wallat, Jonas
Anand, Avishek
Jatowt, Adam
contents Temporal awareness is crucial in many information retrieval tasks, particularly in scenarios where the relevance of documents depends on their alignment with the query's temporal context. Traditional approaches such as BM25 and Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) focus on lexical or semantic similarity but tend to neglect the temporal alignment between queries and documents, which is essential for time-sensitive tasks like temporal question answering (TQA). We propose TempRetriever, a novel extension of DPR that explicitly incorporates temporal information by embedding both the query date and document timestamp into the retrieval process. This allows retrieving passages that are not only contextually relevant but also aligned with the temporal intent of queries. We evaluate TempRetriever on two large-scale datasets ArchivalQA and ChroniclingAmericaQA demonstrating its superiority over baseline retrieval models across multiple metrics. TempRetriever achieves a 6.63\% improvement in Top-1 retrieval accuracy and a 3.79\% improvement in NDCG@10 compared to the standard DPR on ArchivalQA. Similarly, for ChroniclingAmericaQA, TempRetriever exhibits a 9.56\% improvement in Top-1 retrieval accuracy and a 4.68\% improvement in NDCG@10. We also propose a novel, time-based negative sampling strategy which further enhances retrieval performance by addressing temporal misalignment during training. Our results underline the importance of temporal aspects in dense retrieval systems and establish a new benchmark for time-aware passage retrieval.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_21024
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TempRetriever: Fusion-based Temporal Dense Passage Retrieval for Time-Sensitive Questions
Abdallah, Abdelrahman
Piryani, Bhawna
Wallat, Jonas
Anand, Avishek
Jatowt, Adam
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
Temporal awareness is crucial in many information retrieval tasks, particularly in scenarios where the relevance of documents depends on their alignment with the query's temporal context. Traditional approaches such as BM25 and Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) focus on lexical or semantic similarity but tend to neglect the temporal alignment between queries and documents, which is essential for time-sensitive tasks like temporal question answering (TQA). We propose TempRetriever, a novel extension of DPR that explicitly incorporates temporal information by embedding both the query date and document timestamp into the retrieval process. This allows retrieving passages that are not only contextually relevant but also aligned with the temporal intent of queries. We evaluate TempRetriever on two large-scale datasets ArchivalQA and ChroniclingAmericaQA demonstrating its superiority over baseline retrieval models across multiple metrics. TempRetriever achieves a 6.63\% improvement in Top-1 retrieval accuracy and a 3.79\% improvement in NDCG@10 compared to the standard DPR on ArchivalQA. Similarly, for ChroniclingAmericaQA, TempRetriever exhibits a 9.56\% improvement in Top-1 retrieval accuracy and a 4.68\% improvement in NDCG@10. We also propose a novel, time-based negative sampling strategy which further enhances retrieval performance by addressing temporal misalignment during training. Our results underline the importance of temporal aspects in dense retrieval systems and establish a new benchmark for time-aware passage retrieval.
title TempRetriever: Fusion-based Temporal Dense Passage Retrieval for Time-Sensitive Questions
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21024