TicTac: Time-aware Supervised Fine-tuning for Automatic Text Dating

Han Ren, Minna Peng


Abstract
Pre-trained langauge models have achieved success in many natural language processing tasks, whereas they are trapped by the time-agnostic setting, impacting the performance in automatic text dating. This paper introduces TicTac, a supervised fine-tuning model for automatic text dating. Unlike the existing models that always ignore the temporal relatedness of documents, TicTac has the ability to learn temporal semantic information, which is helpful for capturing the temporal implications over long-time span corpora. As a fine-tuning framework, TicTac employs a contrastive learning-based approach to model two types of temporal relations of diachronic documents. TicTac also adopts a metric learning approach, where the temporal distance between a historical text and its category label is estimated, which benefits to learn temporal semantic information on texts with temporal ordering. Experiments on two diachronic corpora show that our model effectively captures the temporal semantic information and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1129
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21906–21918
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.1129/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Han Ren and Minna Peng. 2025. TicTac: Time-aware Supervised Fine-tuning for Automatic Text Dating. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 21906–21918, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TicTac: Time-aware Supervised Fine-tuning for Automatic Text Dating (Ren & Peng, Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.1129.pdf