DS@GT at LongEval: Evaluating Temporal Performance in Web Search Systems and Topics with Two-Stage Retrieval

Abstract: Information Retrieval (IR) models are often trained on static datasets, making them vulnerable to performance degradation as web content evolves. The DS@GT competition team participated in the Longitudinal Evaluation of Model Performance (LongEval) lab at CLEF 2025, which evaluates IR systems across temporally distributed web snapshots. Our analysis of the Qwant web dataset includes exploratory data analysis with topic modeling over time. The two-phase retrieval system employs sparse keyword searches, utilizing query expansion and document reranking. Our best system achieves an average NDCG@10 of 0.296 across the entire training and test dataset, with an overall best score of 0.395 on 2023-05. The accompanying source code for this paper is at https://github.com/dsgt-arc/longeval-2025