Document indexing: a concept-based approach to term weight estimation

Traditional index weighting approaches for information retrieval from texts depend on the term frequency based analysis of the text contents. A shortcoming of these indexing schemes, which consider only the occurrences of the terms in a document, is that they have some limitations in extracting semantically exact indexes that represent the semantic content of a document. To address this issue, we developed a new indexing formalism that considers not only the terms in a document, but also the concepts. In this approach, concept clusters are defined and a concept vector space model is proposed to represent the semantic importance degrees of lexical items and concepts within a document. Through an experiment on the TREC collection of Wall Street Journal documents, we show that the proposed method outperforms an indexing method based on term frequency (TF), especially in regard to the few highest-ranked documents. Moreover, the index term dimension was 80% lower for the proposed method than for the TF-based method, which is expected to significantly reduce the document search time in a real environment. 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.