Temporal Intelligence in Language Technologies: Modeling, Retrieval, and Reasoning

Time is central to how we understand the world. It shapes how we interpret events, construct narratives, and reason about change, causality, and evidence. In this talk, I will first examine how well large language models handle temporal information and temporal reasoning, an essential but still less explored dimension of language intelligence. I will then discuss recent advances in incorporating temporal awareness into language technologies, including time-aware representation learning, retrieval from evolving document collections, and the development of new resources for training and evaluation. I will also introduce temporal reasoning-oriented question answering and retrieval benchmarks that highlight the challenges of retrieving time-sensitive information, answering complex temporal questions, and reasoning over changing evidence. The talk will conclude with open challenges for building language technologies that can better understand, retrieve, and reason over information across time.

Professor Adam Jatowt 

Adam Jatowt is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Deputy Head of the Digital Science Center at the University of Innsbruck. He obtained his PhD in Information Science and Technology from the University of Tokyo in 2005 and subsequently worked for 14 years at Kyoto University. His research focuses on information retrieval and natural language processing, with particular emphasis on temporal information. He is a recipient of the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the International Excellence Fellowship from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He has served as Program Committee Chair of ECIR 2026, ICONIP 2022, ICADL 2019, and JCDL 2017, and as General Chair of TPDL 2019 and ICADL 2020. He is currently an Associate Editor of ACM TOIS and JASIST. From 2019 to 2022, he served as Steering Committee Chair of the ICADL conference. He has received Best Paper, Best Short Paper, and Best Demo Paper awards at ECIR, as well as the Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award at JCDL.