Combining recency and topic-dependent temporal variation for microblog search

Abstract

The appearance of microblogging services has led to many short documents being issued by crowds of people. To retrieve useful information from among such a huge quantity of messages, query expansion (QE) is usually used to enrich a user query. Some QE methods for microblog search utilize temporal properties (e.g., recency and temporal variation) derived from the real-time characteristic that many messages are posted by users when an interesting event has recently occurred. Our approach leverages temporal properties for QE and combines them according to the temporal variation of a given topic. Experimental results show that this QE method using automatically combined temporal properties is effective at improving retrieval performance. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.