Searching through time in the New York Times

In this paper we describe the Time Explorer, an application designed for analyzing how news changes over time. We extend on current time-based systems in several important ways. First, Time Explorer is designed to help users discover how entities such as people and locations associated with a query change over time. Second, by searching on time ex- pressions extracted automatically from text, the application allows the user to explore not only how topics evolved in the past, but also how they will continue to evolve in the future. Finally, Time Explorer is designed around an intuitive inter- face that allows users to interact with time and entities in a powerful way. While aspects of these features can be found in other systems, they are combined in Time Explorer in a way that allows searching through time in no time at all.