Large Language Model-Powered Query-Driven Event Timeline Summarization in Industrial Search

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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Mingyue, Xie, Xingyu, Yang, Hang, Gao, Li, Su, Lixin, Chen, Ge, Yin, Dawei, Shi, Daiting
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Wang, Mingyue
Xie, Xingyu
Yang, Hang
Gao, Li
Su, Lixin
Chen, Ge
Yin, Dawei
Shi, Daiting
author_facet Wang, Mingyue
Xie, Xingyu
Yang, Hang
Gao, Li
Su, Lixin
Chen, Ge
Yin, Dawei
Shi, Daiting
contents Understanding how events evolve over time is essential for search engines handling queries about trending news. We present QDET (Query-Driven Event Timeline Summarization), a production system deployed on Baidu Search that constructs focused event timelines to explain specific query events. Unlike traditional topic-centric approaches that aim for comprehensive coverage, QDET identifies and organizes sub-events closely relevant to the query from noisy candidate sets formed by millions of documents retrieved daily. QDET incorporates two key innovations: (1) multi-task supervised fine-tuning with three auxiliary tasks-temporal ordering, causal judgment, and timeline completion-that enable compact models to match the performance of much larger general-purpose models in specialized domains; (2) reinforcement learning-based event concise summarization that enforces strict length constraints while maintaining semantic quality, achieving 88.2% length compliance and outperforming 671B-scale models by 7.7 points in constraint satisfaction. Our fine-tuned 7B parameter model achieves 76.2% F1 score on timeline summarization, slightly surpassing the zero-shot performance of DeepSeek-R1-671B (76.1% F1) while using only 1% of its parameters-demonstrating that domain-specific optimization enables production-ready models with comparable quality at drastically reduced computational costs. Online A/B tests on Baidu Search validate real-world effectiveness, showing 5.5% CTR improvement, 4.6% longer dwell time, and 4.4% deeper exploration compared to single-task baselines. We further demonstrate that timeline understanding transfers to heat prediction, confirming effective knowledge transfer to downstream tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_27066
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Large Language Model-Powered Query-Driven Event Timeline Summarization in Industrial Search
Wang, Mingyue
Xie, Xingyu
Yang, Hang
Gao, Li
Su, Lixin
Chen, Ge
Yin, Dawei
Shi, Daiting
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Understanding how events evolve over time is essential for search engines handling queries about trending news. We present QDET (Query-Driven Event Timeline Summarization), a production system deployed on Baidu Search that constructs focused event timelines to explain specific query events. Unlike traditional topic-centric approaches that aim for comprehensive coverage, QDET identifies and organizes sub-events closely relevant to the query from noisy candidate sets formed by millions of documents retrieved daily. QDET incorporates two key innovations: (1) multi-task supervised fine-tuning with three auxiliary tasks-temporal ordering, causal judgment, and timeline completion-that enable compact models to match the performance of much larger general-purpose models in specialized domains; (2) reinforcement learning-based event concise summarization that enforces strict length constraints while maintaining semantic quality, achieving 88.2% length compliance and outperforming 671B-scale models by 7.7 points in constraint satisfaction. Our fine-tuned 7B parameter model achieves 76.2% F1 score on timeline summarization, slightly surpassing the zero-shot performance of DeepSeek-R1-671B (76.1% F1) while using only 1% of its parameters-demonstrating that domain-specific optimization enables production-ready models with comparable quality at drastically reduced computational costs. Online A/B tests on Baidu Search validate real-world effectiveness, showing 5.5% CTR improvement, 4.6% longer dwell time, and 4.4% deeper exploration compared to single-task baselines. We further demonstrate that timeline understanding transfers to heat prediction, confirming effective knowledge transfer to downstream tasks.
title Large Language Model-Powered Query-Driven Event Timeline Summarization in Industrial Search
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27066