ON MODELING OF INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL CONCEPTS IN VECTOR-SPACES

The Vector Space Model (VSM) has been adopted in information retrieval as a means of coping with inexact representation of documents and queries, and the resulting difficulties in determining the relevance of a document relative to a given query. A generalization of the VSM, called the GVSM, is advanced. The developments provide a solution not only for the computation of a measure of similarity (correlation) between terms, but also for the incorporation of these similarities into the retrieval process. The major strength of the GVSM derives from the fact that it is theoretically sound and elegant. Furthermore, experimental evaluation of the model on several test collections indicates that the performance is better than that of the VSM.