Temporal query resolution¶

Temporal language is extracted during query analysis and resolved by PreparedQuery against either the query's explicit reference date or the current date. PreparedQuery::temporal_context() is the shared handoff to single-index ranking and segmented routing.

For example, “during the past month” is recognized as an explicit temporal range. With a reference date of 2023-07-01, it resolves to the inclusive interval 2023-06-01 through 2023-07-01. Month and year offsets use calendar arithmetic; day and week offsets use day counts. The range is passed as starts_from and ends_at, and the same bounds become the segmented routing window. A resolved closed interval is a hard constraint: documents with missing, unparseable, or out-of-range timestamps are removed before lexical and hybrid candidates are collected. This prevents out-of-window candidates from crowding the ranking before temporal scoring. Explicit ranges also suppress the legacy point-target parser and keep sequence reranking active.

Point expressions such as “last Tuesday” continue to produce an anchor and a seven-day routing window around it. Session-provided absolute anchors retain their existing path.

Timestamps describe when a memory was recorded, not necessarily when an event mentioned in it happened. Hard filtering therefore treats the recording date as the available temporal proxy. Point expressions without a closed interval keep their existing proximity-scoring behavior; they do not activate this hard filter.