Revisiting the term frequency in concept-based IR models

Abstract

Indexing documents and queries using concepts, instead of word-based indexing, is an alternative approach, and it supposes to give a more meaningful indexing. However, this way of indexing needs to revisit some hypotheses of classical Information Retrieval. Therefore, we propose a new concept weighting approach, namely Relative Weight, which weights concepts with respect to their corresponding text in the documents or queries. In other words, it assigns to each concept a relative weight with respect to the other concepts in the same context. We explore interesting experimental results of our new weighting approach, compared to the classical approaches, through studying the retrieval performance of some classical IR models. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.