A Clustered Search Algorithm Incorporating Arbitrary Term Dependencies

Abstract

The documents in a database are organized into clusters, where each cluster contains similar documents and a representative of these documents. A user query is compared with all the representatives of the clusters, and on the basis of such comparisons, those clusters having many close neighbors with respect to the query are selected for searching. This paper presents an estimation of the number of close neighbors in a cluster in relation to the given query. The estimation takes into consideration the dependencies between terms. It is demonstrated by experiments that the estimate is accurate and the time to generate the estimate is small. © 1982, ACM. All rights reserved.