A cooccurrence-based thesaurus and two applications to information retrieval

Abstract

This paper presents a new method for computing a thesaurus from a text corpus. Each word is represented as a vector in a multi-dimensional space that captures cooccurrence information. Words are defined to be similar if they have similar cooccurrence patterns. Two different methods for using these thesaurus vectors in information retrieval are shown to significantly improve performance over the Tipster reference corpus as compared to a term vector space baseline. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.