Text Retrieval by Term Co-occurrences in a Query-based Vector Space

AbstractTerm co-occurrence in a sentence or paragraph is a powerful and often overlooked feature for text matching in document retrieval. In our experiments with matching email-style query messages to webpages, such term co-occurrence helped greatly to filter and rank documents, compared to matching document-size bags-of-words. The paper presents the results of the experiments as well as a text-matching model where the query shapes the vector space, a document is modelled by two or three vectors in this vector space, and the query-document similarity score depends on the length of the vectors and the relationships between them.