On the necessity of term dependence in a query space for weighted retrieval

• Published in: Journal of the American Society for Information Science Vol. 49; no. 13; pp. 1161 - 1168
• Main Authors: Bollmann-Sdorra, Peter, Raghavan, Vijay V.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, D.C Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company 01.11.1998; John Wiley & Sons; American Documentation Institute; Wiley Periodicals Inc
• Subjects: Context; Dependence; Documentation; Exact sciences and technology; Information and communication sciences; Information processing and retrieval; Information Retrieval; Information retrieval. Man machine relationship; Information science. Documentation; Investigations; Mathematical Formulas; Mathematical models; Natural language; Online information retrieval; Preferences; Proof (Mathematics); Queries; Query Processing; Raghavan, V; Retrieval; Retrieval performance measures; Science; Sciences and techniques of general use; Search output; Searching; Space; Subject Index Terms; Term independence; Terminology; Vector Model; Vector space; Vector space model; Vector Spaces; Weighted Term Searching; Weighting; New York; United States > US; Relevance; Theoretical study; Information retrieval; Vector space model; Weighting; Independence
• ISSN: 0002-8231; 1097-4571
• DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1998)49:13<1161::AID-ASI3>3.0.CO;2-2

In recent years, in the context of the vector space model, the view, held by many researchers, that documents, queries, terms, etc., are all elements of a common space has been challenged (Bollmann‐Sdorra & Raghavan, 1993). In particular, it was noted that term independence has to be investigated in the context of user preferences and it was shown, through counterexamples, that term independence can hold in the document space, but not in the query space and vice versa. In this article, we continue the investigation of query and document spaces with respect to the property of term independence. We prove, under realistic assumptions, that requiring term independence to hold in the query space is inconsistent with the goal of achieving better performance by means of weighted retrieval. The result that term independence in the query space is undesirable is obtained without making any assumption about whether or not the property of term independence holds in the document space. The results of this article reinforce our position that the properties of document and query spaces must be investigated separately, since the document and query spaces do not necessarily have the same properties.