{"id":1162168,"date":"2026-02-13T15:03:39","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T23:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1162168"},"modified":"2026-02-13T15:03:39","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T23:03:39","slug":"harnessing-temporal-databases-for-systematic-evaluation-of-factual-time-sensitive-question-answering-in-large-language-models","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/harnessing-temporal-databases-for-systematic-evaluation-of-factual-time-sensitive-question-answering-in-large-language-models\/","title":{"rendered":"Harnessing Temporal Databases for Systematic Evaluation of Factual Time-Sensitive Question-Answering in Large Language Models"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Facts evolve over time, making it essential for Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle time-sensitive factual knowledge accurately and reliably. While factual Time-Sensitive Question-Answering (TSQA) tasks have been widely studied, existing benchmarks often rely on manual curation or a small, fixed set of predefined templates, which restricts scalable and comprehensive TSQA evaluation. To address these challenges, we propose TDBench, a new benchmark that systematically constructs TSQA pairs by harnessing temporal databases and database techniques such as temporal SQL and functional dependencies. We also introduce a fine-grained evaluation metric called time accuracy, which assesses the validity of time references in model explanations alongside traditional answer accuracy to enable a more reliable TSQA evaluation. Extensive experiments on contemporary LLMs show how \\ours{} enables scalable and comprehensive TSQA evaluation while reducing the reliance on human labor, complementing existing Wikipedia\/Wikidata-based TSQA evaluation approaches by enabling LLM evaluation on application-specific data and seamless multi-hop question generation. Code and data are publicly available at: https:\/\/github.com\/ssoy0701\/tdbench.git.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Facts evolve over time, making it essential for Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle time-sensitive factual knowledge accurately and reliably. While factual Time-Sensitive Question-Answering (TSQA) tasks have been widely studied, existing benchmarks often rely on manual curation or a small, fixed set of predefined templates, which restricts scalable and comprehensive TSQA evaluation. To address these [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"ICLR 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