A Time-Aware Approach to Improving Ad-hoc Information Retrieval from Microblogs

There is an immense number of short-text documents produced as the result of microblogging. The content produced is growing as the number of microbloggers grows, and as active microbloggers continue to post millions of updates. The range of topics discussed is so vast, that microblogs provide an abundance of useful information. In this work, the problem of retrieving the most relevant information in microblogs is addressed. Interesting temporal patterns were found in the initial analysis of the study. Therefore the focus of the current work is to first exploit a temporal variable in order to see how effectively it can be used to predict the relevance of the tweets and, then, to include it in a retrieval weighting model along with other tweet-specific features. Generalized Linear Mixed-effect Models (GLMMs) are used to analyze the features and to propose two re-ranking models. These two models were developed through an exploratory process on a training set and then were evaluated on a test set.