On Generalized Vector Space Model in Information Retrieval

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Wong, S.K.M. | Ziarko, Wojciech

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, University of Regina

Abstract: In information retrieval, it is common to model index terms and documents as vectors in a suitably defined vector space. The main difficulty with this approach is that the explicit representation of term vectors is not known a priori. For this reason, the vector space model adopted by Salton for the SMART system treats the terms as a set of orthogonal vectors. In such a model it is often necessary to adopt a separate, corrective procedure to take into account the correlations between terms. In this paper, we propose a systematic method (the generalized vector space model) to compute term correlations directly from automatic indexing scheme. We also demonstrate how such correlations can be included with minimal modification in the existing vector based information retrieval systems.

Keywords: information retrieval, vector space models

DOI: 10.3233/FI-1985-8207

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 253-267, 1985