Use of temporal expressions in web searches

• Author(s): Sérgio Sobral Nunes ; Maria Cristina de Carvalho Alves Ribeiro ; Gabriel de Sousa Torcato David
• Date: 2008
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10216/5550
• Origin: Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto
• Subject(s): Ciências tecnológicas; Tecnologia; Tecnologia da informação
• Document Type: Conference Object
• Language: English

Description

While trying to understand and characterize users’ behavior online, the temporal dimension has received little attention by the research community. This exploratory study uses two collections of web search queries to investigate the use of temporal information needs. Using state-of-the-art information extraction techniques we identify temporal expressions in these queries. We find that temporal expressions are rarely used (1.5% of queries) and, when used, they are related to current and past events. Also, there are specific topics where the use of temporal expressions is more visible.