8. A system, comprising one or more computer processor circuits that are configured for natural language processing, wherein the one or more computer processor circuits are configured to: receive a text; identify a set of linguistic characteristics contained in the text, wherein linguistic characteristics include grammatical, syntactic, and idiomatic features of the text; determine a plurality of time periods in which the text was potentially written based on the set of linguistic characteristics; retrieve a set of reference documents for each time period in the plurality of time periods, in response to the determining the plurality of time periods in which the text was potentially written; produce a set of proximity scores the text by performing a set of proximity checks using the set of linguistic characteristics, the set of reference documents for each time period, and the text, wherein the proximity checks analyze a usage frequency of the set of linguistic characteristics and a temporal closeness of the plurality of time periods in the set of linguistic characteristics between the text and the set of reference documents for each time period are to one another; rank the plurality of time periods based on the set of proximity scores; and return a set of one or more ranked time periods of the plurality of time periods.
9. The system of claim 8 , wherein producing the set of proximity scores includes: producing a first subset of proximity scores by performing a first subset of proximity checks using the set of linguistic characteristics, and the text; and producing a second subset of proximity scores by performing a second subset of proximity checks using the set of linguistic characteristics and the set of reference documents for each time period.