Indexing Techniques for Temporal Text Containment Queries

Many information management systems maintain multiple time stamped versions of documents. The archives of web pages, version control systems, wikis and backup mechanisms are examples of such systems. For such temporally versioned document collections, a search using keywords along the temporal dimension is valuable. This paper studies the temporal dimension of keyword search in the context of text document collections. The inverted index, which is an integral part of keyword based IR technique, requires several extensions for it to support keyword search over temporal document collections. We propose a number of techniques that explore such extensions. Several experimental results are also presented to compare the proposed solutions.