Exploring Entity Associations Over Time

We address the problem of entity-oriented search in the humanities and social sciences domain. We are particularly interested in retrieving entities related to a query entity and finding associations between these entities over time. Evidence from our target end users suggests that it is more informative to view these associations as dynamic phenomena that evolve over time than as static phenomena. We present work-in-progress on methods to extract these associations and their temporal extent, and discuss a way of presenting them in an exploratory search interface. This interface is intended to help users to discover interesting associations between entities over time.