Modeling geographic, temporal, and proximity contexts for improving geotemporal search

Traditional information retrieval (IR) systems show significant limitations on returning relevant documents that satisfy the user's information needs. In particular, to answer geographic and temporal user queries, the IR task becomes a nonstraightforward process where the available geographic and temporal information is often unstructured. In this article, we propose a geotemporal search approach that consists of modeling and exploiting geographic and temporal query context evidence that refers to implicit multivarying geographic and temporal intents behind the query. Modeling geographic and temporal query contexts is based on extracting and ranking geographic and temporal keywords found in pseudo‐relevant feedback (PRF) documents for a given query. Our geotemporal search approach is based on exploiting the geographic and temporal query contexts separately into a probabilistic ranking model and jointly into a proximity ranking model. Our hypothesis is based on the concept that geographic and temporal expressions tend to co‐occur within the document where the closer they are in the document, the more relevant the document is. Finally, geographic, temporal, and proximity scores are combined according to a linear combination formula. An extensive experimental evaluation conducted on a portion of the New York Times news collection and the TREC 2004 robust retrieval track collection shows that our geotemporal approach outperforms significantly a well‐known baseline search and the best known geotemporal search approaches in the domain. Finally, an in‐depth analysis shows a positive correlation between the geographic and temporal query sensitivity and the retrieval performance. Also, we find that geotemporal distance has a positive impact on retrieval performance generally.