Back to the Past

Abstract

Fully understanding an older news article requires context knowledge from the time of article creation. Finding information about such context is a tedious and time-consuming task, which distracts the reader. Simple contextualization via Wikification is not sufficient here. The retrieved context information has to be time-aware, concise (not full Wikipages) and focused on the coherence of the article topic. In this paper, we present an approach for time-aware recontextualization, which takes those requirements into account in order to improve reading experience. For this purpose, we propose (1) different query formulation methods for retrieving contextualization candidates and (2) ranking methods taking into account topical and temporal relevance as well as complementarity with respect to the original text. We evaluate our proposed approaches through extensive experiments using real-world datasets and ground-truth consisting of over 9,400 article/context pairs. To this end, our experimental results show that our approaches retrieve contextualization information for older articles from the New York Times Archive with high precision and outperform baselines significantly.