The vector space model for scoring

In Section 6.2 (page ) we developed the notion of a document vector that captures the relative importance of the terms in a document. The representation of a set of documents as vectors in a common vector space is known as the vector space model and is fundamental to a host of information retrieval operations ranging from scoring documents on a query, document classification and document clustering. We first develop the basic ideas underlying vector space scoring; a pivotal step in this development is the view (Section 6.3.2 ) of queries as vectors in the same vector space as the document collection.