# Reproducible Hybrid Time-Travel Retrieval in Evolving Corpora

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04051 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04051/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [What Could the Agent See at 19:05? Generating Temporal Enterprise Scenarios from Real Research and Replaying Them to Evaluate Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01042/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There are settings in which reproducibility of ranked lists is desirable, such as when extracting a subset of an evolving document corpus for downstream research tasks or in domains such as patent retrieval or in medical systematic reviews, with high reproducibility expectations. However, as global term statistics change when documents change or are added to a corpus, queries using typical ranked retrieval models are not even reproducible for the parts of the document corpus that have not changed. Thus, Boolean retrieval frequently remains the mechanism of choice in such settings. We present a hybrid retrieval system combining Lucene for fast retrieval with a column-store-based retrieval system maintaining a versioned and time-stamped index. The latter component allows re-execution of previously posed queries resulting in the same ranked list and further allows for time-travel queries over evolving collection, as web archives, while maintaining the original ranking. Thus, retrieval results in evolving document collections are fully reproducible even when document collections and thus term statistics change.