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Vector-Space Model

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

VSM

Definition

The Vector-Space Model (VSM) for Information Retrieval represents documents and queries as vectors of weights. Each weight is a measure of the importance of an index term in a document or a query, respectively. The index term weights are computed on the basis of the frequency of the index terms in the document, the query or the collection. At retrieval time, the documents are ranked by the cosine of the angle between the document vectors and the query vector. For each document and query, the cosine of the angle is calculated as the ratio between the inner product between the document vector and the query vector, and the product of the norm of the document vector by the norm of the query vector. The documents are then returned by the system by decreasing cosine.

Historical Background

The use of vectors for modeling IR systems dates back to the early days of IR, especially as a tool for describing how a system should be designed and implemented. The popularity of...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Massimo Melucci

Authors
  1. Massimo Melucci
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Melucci, M. (2009). Vector-Space Model. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_918

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