Evaluating Automatically Generated Timelines from the Web

As web searches increase, there is a need to represent the search results in the most comprehensible way possible. In particular, we focus on search results from queries about people and places. The standard method for presentation of search results is an ordered list determined by the Web search engine. Although this is satisfactory in some cases, when searching for people and places, presenting the information indexed by time may be more desirable. We are developing a system called Cronopath, which generates a timeline of web search engine results by determining the time frame of each document in the collection and linking elements in the timeline to the relevant articles. In this paper, we propose evaluation guidelines for judging the quality of automatically generated timelines based on a set of common features.