The RetroC challenge: how to guess the publication year of a text?

This article describes research in automatic content-based temporal classification of texts. Experiments are carried out on a set of texts coming from Polish digital libraries, dating between the years 1814 and 2013. Following successful research in the field of temporal classification, this work aims at creating an automatic dating mechanism to be used in situations, where the publication date of the text is unknown. Automatic publication date assessment from the computer system can provide useful for researchers from various fields of humanities, such as history (incl. history of language), culture-historical archaeology, sociology or anthropology.