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, and queries 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 notation. An analysis shows, however, that the structure of t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Vol. 44; no. 10; p. 579
Main Authors Bollmann-Sdorra, Peter, Raghavan, Vijay V
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken Wiley Periodicals Inc 01.12.1993
Subjects
Computer programming
Information retrieval
Linearity
Queries
Similarity
Space
Systems analysis
Systems design
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Summary:Many authors, who adopt the vector space model, take the view that documents, terms, and queries 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 notation. An analysis shows, however, that the structure of the query space can be very different from that of the document space. To this end, concepts like preference, similarity, term independence, and linearity, both in the document space and in the query space, are examined. The conclusion is that a more realistic and complete view of information retrieval (IR) is obtained if documents and queries are not considered to be elements of the same space. This conclusion implies that certain restrictions usually applied in the design 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:2330-1635
2330-1643