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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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of the American Society for Information Science Vol. 44; no. 110; p. 579
Main Authors Bollmann-Sdorra, Peter, Raghavan, Vijay V
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Wiley Periodicals Inc 01.12.1993
Subjects
Boolean
Experiments
Feedback
Information retrieval
Linearity
Queries
R&D
Relevance feedback
Research & development
Science
Semiotics
Similarity
Space
Vector space
New York
United States > US
Chicago Illinois
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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.
ISSN:0002-8231
1097-4571