Tiwiki: Searching Wikipedia with Temporal Constraints

Temporal information retrieval received a lot of attention during the last years and it is, in the meantime, widely accepted in the IR community that temporal information needs are important to tackle. A particular type of temporal queries are those with explicit temporal constraints, which make almost 15% of today’s Web search queries. Although several approaches to allow textual search combined with temporal constraints regarding the content of the documents have been suggested, there are no publicly available search engines allowing for a time-centric search experience. In this paper, we suggest Tiwiki, a time-aware search engine for Wikipedia. Relying on steadily updated Wikipedia dumps annotated with temporal expressions, queries with textual and temporal components can be formulated and are served by ranking the search results based on aggregated values of temporal and textual relevance. As the search results directly link to the original Wikipedia pages, the Tiwiki search engine can be considered as slightly delayed, yet timely access to Wikipedia.