Towards Time-Aware Language Models: Modeling, Retrieval, and Reasoning

Par

Adam Jatowt

University of Innsbruck

Vendredi 24 avril 2026, 10:30-11:30 EST, Salle 3195

Pavillon André-Aisenstadt, Université de Montréal, 2920 Chemin de la Tour

Abstract: Time is central to how we understand the world, shaping how we interpret events, construct narratives, and reason about cause and effect. In this talk, I examine how well large language models handle temporal reasoning—an essential yet underexplored aspect of language intelligence. I will discuss our recent advances in incorporating temporal awareness into language models, including approaches to 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 QA and retrieval benchmarks that highlight the challenges of retrieving time-sensitive information and addressing complex temporal questions. Finally, I will also briefly present our recent work on automatically generating hints to guide user reasoning and mitigate cognitive offloading.

Bio: 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 received his PhD in Information Science and Technology from the University of Tokyo and spent 14 years at Kyoto University. His research interests include natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge management, and temporal information processing. 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 (KIT). He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) and the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). Adam 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. He has also been a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, KIT, the University of Toulouse, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), the University of Porto, and the University of La Rochelle.