ChroniclingAmericaQA · 12,695 passages · 1800–1963 Hit@1  59.1% vs 40.4% baseline
Research Demo

Standard dense retrieval is temporally blind. Contriever finds semantically similar passages regardless of era, so queries about 1850 can surface passages from 1920. This system fine-tunes Contriever with temporal triplet training and applies MRAG re-ranking to anchor retrieval to the correct historical period.

59.1% Hit@1 vs 40.4% baseline on ChroniclingAmericaQA · 12,695 passages · Chronicling America newspapers 1800–1963
Step 1
Pick a pre-validated query from the era tabs below, or write your own in the text field. Set the target year to match.
Step 2
Click Run Comparison. Standard Retrieval and Time-Aware RAG both search the same 12,695-passage corpus simultaneously.
Step 3
Read the generated answer, then scroll down to see which model retrieved passages from the right era. Amber border means era match, red means mismatch.
Louisiana Purchase1800
What country did Spain transfer Louisiana to in 1800?
Territorial Control1800
Who was in possession of East and West Florida in 1800?
Presidency1808
Who was the president of the United States in 1808?
Political Duels1808
Who did Dewitt Clinton come close to fighting in 1808?
Banking & Finance1813
Who did political events introduce the house of in 1813?
Trade Policy1816
Which state supported the Tariff of 1816?
Jackson’s Duel1816
Who did General Jackson fight and kill in 1816?
Whig Party1832
In what state did the Whigs claim a great gain over the vote of 1832?
Abolition1833
Which country signed a treaty with England in 1833 for suppression of the slave trade?
Presidential Election1844
Who was elected president of the United States in 1844?
Global Missions1841
How many mission stations were there in Africa in 1841?
Urban Growth1850
What was the population of New York City in 1850?
Abolition Movement1850
What was the state of the abolition movement in 1850?
Civil War1861
How did Abraham Lincoln respond to Southern secession in 1861?
Technology & Media1870
How did the telegraph change news reporting in 1870?
Westward Expansion1870
What was the Homestead Act and how did it affect settlers in 1870?
Railroad Expansion1875
How did railroads transform commerce and travel in the 1870s?
Presidency1880
Who was president of the United States in 1880?
Spanish-American War1898
What were the terms of peace ending the Spanish-American War in 1898?
Naval History1898
What role did the Navy play in the Spanish-American War in 1898?
or write your own query
Custom queries depend on corpus coverage. Pre-validated cards above are confirmed to produce answers. The corpus is Chronicling America newspaper excerpts, so specific factual questions work best. Broad explanatory questions like “how did X develop” usually do not.
As-of Year
Encoding Retrieval Re-ranking Generating
Generated Answer
Standard Retrievalfacebook/contriever-msmarco · no temporal awareness
Time-Aware RAGfine-tuned Contriever + MRAG re-ranking
Standard Retrieval results will appear here.
Time-Aware RAG results will appear here.