FEUP at TREC 2008 Blog Track: Using Temporal Evidence for Ranking and Feed Distillation

This paper presents the participation of FEUP, from University of Porto, in the TREC 2008 Blog Track. FEUP participated in two tasks, the baseline adhoc retrieval task and the blog finding distillation task. Our approach was focused on the use of the temporal information available in the TREC Blog06 collection. For the baseline adhoc retrieval task a simple temporal sort was evaluated. In the blog finding distillation task we tested three alternative scoring functions based on temporal evidence. All features were combined with a BM25 baseline run using a standard rank aggregation approach. We observed small, but statistically significant, improvements in several evaluation measures when temporal information is used.