Text2Time: Transformer-based article time period predictor

We explore the problem of predicting the publication period of text document, such as a news article, using the text from that document. In order to do so, we created our own extensive labeled dataset of over 350,000 news articles published by The New York Times over six decades. We then provide an implementation of a simple Naive Bayes baseline model, which surprisingly achieves decent performance in terms of accuracy.Finally, for our approach, we use a pretrained BERT model fine-tuned for the task of text classification. This model exceeds our expectations and provides some very impressive results in terms of accurately classifying news articles into their respective publication decades. The results beat the performance of the few previously tried models for this relatively unexplored task of time prediction from text.