On the Delusiveness of Adopting a Common Space for Modeling IR Objects: Are Queries Documents?
Many authors, who adopt the vector space model, take the view that documents, terms, queries, etc., are all elements within the same (conceptual) space. This view seems to be a natural one, given that documents and queries have the same vector no- tation. We show, however, that the structure of the...
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Published in | Journal of the American Society for Information Science Vol. 44; no. 110; p. 579 |
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Main Authors | , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
New York
Wiley Periodicals Inc
01.12.1993
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Many authors, who adopt the vector space model, take the view that documents, terms, queries, etc., are all elements within the same (conceptual) space. This view seems to be a natural one, given that documents and queries have the same vector no- tation. We show, however, that the structure of the query space can be very different from that of the document space. To this end, concepts like pref erence, similarity, term independence, and linearity, both in the document space and in the query space, are discussed. Our conclusion is that a more re- alistic and complete view of IR is obtained if we do not consider documents and queries to be ele- ments of the same space. This conclusion implies that certain restrictions usually applied in the de- sign of an IR system are obviated. For example, the retrieval function need not be restricted to the ones that have the possibility to be interpreted as a similarity measure. |
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ISSN: | 0002-8231 1097-4571 |