TEMPS: Temporal Sentence Embeddings for Temporal Information Retrieval

arXiv:2609.28048 · cs.CL, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-09-23 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-09-23

Updated: 2026-09-23

Code: https://github.com/aldebaran-care/TEMPS

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Modern information retrieval (IR) systems rarely represent time, yet many information needs depend on it: in clinical, journalistic, and legal search, when an event occurred can decide whether a

Terminology

Abstract

Modern information retrieval (IR) systems rarely represent time, yet many information needs depend on it: in clinical, journalistic, and legal search, when an event occurred can decide whether a document is relevant. Dense retrievers and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines match queries to documents well on topic but poorly on time, so they surface content that is on-topic yet temporally wrong. We introduce Temporal Textual Similarity (TTS), a task that measures how well two anchored texts align in time, independent of their topical similarity. We then present TEMPS (Temporal Embedding Model for Precise Search), a modular temporal branch that attaches to a frozen semantic retriever and trains on that signal. It resolves anchored temporal expressions to intervals and moment-matches each one to a Gaussian; the resulting ordering supervises an anchor-date-conditioned encoder, whose score we fuse with the semantic score at inference. Grounding supplies the supervision, so training uses no hand-labeled temporal data. The temporal score itself is the Gaussian-KL inclusion measure from distributional embeddings; what TEMPS adds is the grounding and the moment-matched supervision. On three temporal benchmarks, TEMPS improves MRR for every semantic backbone tested and, on TS- Retriever, lifts R@1 from 19.92 to 25.39 over the prior temporal state of the art.

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