It's High Time: A Survey of Temporal Information Retrieval and Question Answering

Abstract: Time plays a critical role in how information is generated, retrieved, and interpreted. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of Temporal Information Retrieval and Temporal Question Answering, two research areas aimed at handling and understanding time-sensitive information. As the amount of time-stamped content from sources like news articles, web archives, and knowledge bases increases, systems must address challenges such as detecting temporal intent, normalizing time expressions, ordering events, and reasoning over evolving or ambiguous facts. These challenges are critical across many dynamic and time-sensitive domains, from news and encyclopedias to science, history, and social media. We review both traditional approaches and modern neural methods, including those that use transformer models and LLMs. We also review recent advances in temporal language modeling, multi-hop reasoning, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), alongside benchmark datasets and evaluation strategies that test temporal robustness, recency awareness, and generalization.