Time-Sensitive Language Modelling for Online Term Recurrence Prediction

We address the problem of online term recurrence prediction: for a stream of terms, at each time point predict what term is going to recur next in the stream given the term occurrence history so far. It has many applications, for example, in Web search and social tagging. In this paper, we propose a time-sensitive language modelling approach to this problem that effectively combines term frequency and term recency information, and describe how this approach can be implemented efficiently by an online learning algorithm. Our experiments on a real-world Web query log dataset show significant improvements over standard language modelling.