# Topic-to-Timestamp Alignment by Constrained Evidence Selection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20890 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20890/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Leveraging Passage Retrieval with Generative Models for Open Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01282/) (2020)
- [A Survey on In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00234/) (2022)
- [ERASER: A Benchmark to Evaluate Rationalized NLP Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03429/) (2019)
- [QMSum: A New Benchmark for Query-based Multi-domain Meeting Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05938/) (2021)
- [MeetingBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Meeting Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17529/) (2023)
- [Text-based Localization of Moments in a Video Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08716/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Meeting archives are difficult to search when users remember what was discussed but not when. We study topic-to-timestamp alignment: given a natural-language topic and a timestamped meeting transcript, the goal is to return the time at which the topic is discussed. A standard RAG setup can retrieve relevant transcript excerpts, but still asks the language model to generate a timestamp, which can produce unsupported or invalid timecodes. We therefore recast timestamp prediction as constrained temporal candidate selection: the system retrieves timestamped transcript chunks, and the model selects the candidate that best grounds the topic instead of generating a timecode. On 420 topic-timestamp queries from 200 municipal meeting transcripts, this increases Recall@5 from 31.9% to 50.0%, reduces MAE from 837.0 seconds to 761.0 seconds with Mistral-7B-Instruct, and increases the number of parseable outputs from 373 to 419 of 420 queries. The results suggest that temporal grounding in long transcripts depends strongly on retrieval quality and output design, not only on the choice of the language model.