mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

ChunQiuTR: Time-Keyed Temporal Retrieval in Classical Chinese Annals

arXiv 2604.06997 ↗First posted 8 Apr 2026cs.CLcited by 0

On the map: Retrieval-augmented generation → Generation and context integration

Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval shapes how language models access and ground knowledge in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In historical research, the target is often not an arbitrary relevant passage, but the exact record for a specific regnal month, where temporal consistency matters as much as topical relevance. This is especially challenging for Classical Chinese annals, where time is expressed through terse, implicit, non-Gregorian reign phrases that must be interpreted from surrounding context, so semantically plausible evidence can still be temporally invalid. We introduce ChunQiuTR, a time-keyed retrieval benchmark built from the textitSpring and Autumn Annals and its exegetical tradition. ChunQiuTR organizes records by month-level reign keys and includes chrono-near confounders that mirror realistic retrieval failures. We further propose CTD (Calendrical Temporal Dual-encoder), a time-aware dual-encoder that combines Fourier-based absolute calendrical context with relative offset biasing. Experiments show consistent gains over strong semantic dual-encoder baselines under time-keyed evaluation, supporting retrieval-time temporal consistency as a key prerequisite for faithful downstream historical RAG. Our code and datasets are available at hrefhttps://github.com/xbdxwyh/ChunQiuTRtextttgithub.com/xbdxwyh/ChunQiuTR.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Generation and context integration, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation. Builds on 23 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2026.

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23 of 40 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2020Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks22 May

Other references · 22

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2020A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representationscited by 11,979
  3. 2020Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 3,779
  4. 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,175
  5. 2020ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERTcited by 1,160
  6. 2024M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillationcited by 1,050
  7. 2020Approximate Nearest Neighbor Negative Contrastive Learning for Dense Text Retrievalcited by 846
  8. 2023Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learningcited by 705
  9. 2021Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Modelscited by 462
  10. 2021Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrieverscited by 454
  11. 2024Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Reportcited by 357
  12. 2021Time-Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Basescited by 290
10 more
  1. 2021SPLADE: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for First Stage Rankingcited by 283
  2. 2021A Dataset for Answering Time-Sensitive Questionscited by 150
  3. 2023Unsupervised Dense Retrieval with Relevance-Aware Contrastive Pre-Trainingcited by 35
  4. 2024Jina-ColBERT-v2: A General-Purpose Multilingual Late Interaction Retrievercited by 25
  5. 2022BiTimeBERT: Extending Pre-Trained Language Representations with Bi-Temporal Informationcited by 17
  6. 2022Temporal Label Smoothing for Early Event Predictioncited by 12
  7. 2025It's High Time: A Survey of Temporal Question Answeringcited by 12
  8. 2024Towards Competitive Search Relevance For Inference-Free Learned Sparse Retrieverscited by 8
  9. 2025Temporal Information Retrieval via Time-Specifier Model Mergingcited by 5
  10. 2022XLTime: A Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer Framework for Temporal Expression Extractioncited by 4

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  3. 2026Retrieval and Multi-Hop Reasoning in 1M-Token Context Windows: Evaluating LLMs on Classical Chinese Text
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  6. 2026Q-TIE: A Lightweight and Generalizable Re-ranking Framework for Temporal Information Retrieval
  7. 2025A Question Answering Dataset for Temporal-Sensitive Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  8. 2024MemLong: Memory-Augmented Retrieval for Long Text Modeling