RaTeR: Search Plugin supporting Temporal Operators based Information Retrieval

In this paper, a temporal search plugin, RaTeR has been implemented to support web search based on temporal operators. Traditional commercial search engines provide web search based on time. Google, the most used search engine supports search tools based on time but does not support information retrieval based on temporal relations (operators). Information retrieval based on temporal information helps in temporal ordering of events. The efficiency of the system depends on the effective representation of temporal knowledge. Temporal knowledge representation has to be unambiguous for efficient reasoning about temporal order of events. Allen's temporal relation \"before\" is ambiguous with respect to ordering as it is contextual. REseT (Reference Event based Temporal) relations reduces the ambiguity and hence facilitate better ordering of events. The architecture of RaTeR is presented and some key modules are discussed. And finally, RaTeR has been evaluated using the measures precision, fall-out and is found to be more efficient for temporal operator based web queries.