CHAPTER THREE

Term weighting and similarity

measures

1
 Terms
• Terms are usually stems. Terms can be also phrases, such
as “Computer Science”, “World Wide Web”, etc.
• Documents and queries are represented as vectors or
“bags of words” (BOW).
– Each vector holds a place for every term in the collection.
– Position 1 corresponds to term 1, position 2 to term 2, posi-
tion n to term n.

Di wd i1 , wd i 2 ,..., wd in
Q wq1 , wq 2, ..., wqn W=0 if a term is absent
• Documents are represented by binary weights or Non-bi-
nary weighted vectors of terms. 2
 Document Collection
• A collection of n documents can be represented in the
vector space model by a term-document matrix.
• An entry in the matrix corresponds to the “weight” of a
term in the document; zero means the term has no signif-
icance in the document or it simply doesn’t exist in the
document.
T1 T2 …. Tt
D1 w11 w21 … wt1
D2 w12 w22 … wt2
: : : :
: : : :
Dn w1n w2n … wtn

3
 Binary Weights
• Only the presence (1) or ab- docs t1 t2 t3
sence (0) of a term is in- D1 1 0 1
D2 1 0 0
cluded in the vector D3 0 1 1
• Binary formula gives every D4 1 0 0
D5 1 1 1
word that appears in a docu- D6 1 1 0
ment equal relevance. D7 0 1 0
D8 0 1 0
• It can be useful when fre- D9 0 0 1
quency is not important. D10 0 1 1
D11 1 0 1
• Binary Weights Formula:
1 if freq ij  0

freq ij 
0 if freq ij 0

 Why use term weight-
•
ing?
Binary weights are too limiting.
– terms are either present or absent.
– Not allow to order documents according to their level of
relevance for a given query
• Non-binary weights allow to model partial matching .
– Partial matching allows retrieval of docs that approxi-
mate the query.
• Term-weighting improves quality of answer set.
– Term weighting enables ranking of retrieved documents;
such that best matching documents are ordered at the
top as they are more relevant than others.
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 Term Weighting: Term Frequency (TF)
• TF (term frequency) - Count the number
of times term occurs in document. docs t1 t2 t3
fij = frequency of term i in document j D1 2 0 3
• The more times a term t occurs in docu- D2 1 0 0
ment d the more likely it is that t is rele- D3 0 4 7
vant to the document, i.e. more indicative D4 3 0 0
of the topic.. D5 1 6 3
– If used alone, it favors common words and D6 3 5 0
long documents. D7 0 8 0
– It gives too much credit to words that appears D8 0 10 0
more frequently. D9 0 0 1
• May want to normalize term frequency D10 0 3 5
(tf) across the entire corpus: D11 4 0 1
tfij = fij / max{fij}
 Document Normalization
• Long documents have an unfair advantage:
– They use a lot of terms
• So they get more matches than short documents
– And they use the same words repeatedly
• So they have much higher term frequencies
• Normalization seeks to remove these effects:
– Related somehow to maximum term frequency.
– But also sensitive to the number of terms.
• If we don’t normalize short documents may not be
recognized as relevant.

7
 Problems with term frequency
• Need a mechanism for attenuating the effect of terms
that occur too often in the collection to be meaningful for
relevance/meaning determination
• Scale down the term weight of terms with high collection
frequency
– Reduce the tf weight of a term by a factor that grows
with the collection frequency
• More common for this purpose is document frequency
– how many documents in the collection contain the term

• The example shows that collection

frequency and document frequency
behaves differently 8
 Document Frequency
• It is defined to be the number of docu-
ments in the collection that contain a term
– Document frequency is the number of docu-
ments containing a particular term
DF = document frequency

– Count the frequency considering the whole

collection of documents.
– Less frequently a term appears in the whole
collection, the more discriminating it is.
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 Inverse Document Frequency (IDF)
• IDF measures rarity of the term in collection. The IDF is a
measure of the general importance of the term
– Inverts the document frequency.
• It diminishes the weight of terms that occur very fre-
quently in the collection and increases the weight of
terms that occur rarely.
– Gives full weight to terms that occur in one docu-
ment only.
– Gives lowest weight to terms that occur in all doc-
uments.
– Terms that appear in many different documents are less indica-
tive of overall topic.
idfi = inverse document frequency of term i,
= log2 (N/ df i) (N: total number of documents)
10
 Inverse Document Fre-
• E.g.: given a collectionquency
of 1000 documents and document
frequency, compute IDF for each word?
Word N DF IDF
the 1000 1000 0
some 1000 100 3.322
car 1000 10 6.644
merge 1000 1 9.966
• IDF provides high values for rare words and low values
for common words.
• IDF is an indication of a term’s discrimination power.
– Log used to dampen the effect relative to tf.
– Make the difference between Document frequency vs. corpus
frequency ? 11
 TF*IDF Weighting
• The most used term-weighting is tf*idf weighting
scheme:
wij = tfij idfi = tfij * log2 (N/ dfi)

• A term occurring frequently in the document but

rarely in the rest of the collection is given high
weight.
– The tf-idf value for a term will always be greater than
or equal to zero.
• Experimentally, tf*idf has been found to work
well.
– It is often used in the vector space model together
with cosine similarity to determine the similarity be- 12
tween two documents.
 TF*IDF weighting
• When does TF*IDF registers a high weight? when a term t
occurs many times within a small number of documents
– Highest tf*idf for a term shows a term has a high term frequency
(in the given document) and a low document frequency (in the
whole collection of documents);
– the weights hence tend to filter out common terms.
– Thus lending high discriminating power to those documents
• Lower TF*IDF is registered when the term occurs
fewer times in a document, or occurs in many doc-
uments
– Thus offering a less pronounced relevance signal
• Lowest TF*IDF is registered when the term occurs
in virtually all documents
 Computing TF-IDF: An Example
•Assume collection contains 10,000 documents and statistical
analysis shows that document frequencies (DF) of three
terms are: A(50), B(1300), C(250). And also term frequencies
(TF) of these terms are: A(3), B(2), C(1). Compute TF*IDF for
each term?
A: tf = 3/3=1.00; idf = log2(10000/50) = 7.644; tf*idf
= 7.644
B: tf = 2/3=0.67; idf = log2(10000/1300) = 2.943; tf*idf =
1.962
C: tf = 1/3=0.33; idf = log2(10000/250) = 5.322; tf*idf =
1.774
•Query vector is typically treated as a document and also tf-
14
idf weighted.
 More Example
• Consider a document containing 100 words
wherein the word cow appears 3 times. Now, as-
sume we have 10 million documents and cow ap-
pears in one thousand of these.
– The term frequency (TF) for cow :
3/100 = 0.03

– The inverse document frequency is

log2(10,000,000 / 1,000) = 13.228

– The TF*IDF score is the product of these frequencies:

0.03 * 13.228 = 0.39684 15
 Exercise
• Let C = number of times Word C TW TD DF TF IDF TFIDF
a given word appears in airplane 5 46 3 1
a document; blue 1 46 3 1
• TW = total number of chair 7 46 3 3
words in a document;
computer 3 46 3 1
• TD = total number of
forest 2 46 3 1
documents in a corpus,
and justice 7 46 3 3
• DF = total number of love 2 46 3 1
documents containing a might 2 46 3 1
given word; perl 5 46 3 2
• compute TF, IDF and
rose 6 46 3 3
TF*IDF score for each
shoe 4 46 3 1
term
thesis 2 46 3 2 16
 Concluding remarks
• Suppose from a set of English documents, we wish to determine
which once are the most relevant to the query "the brown cow."
• A simple way to start out is by eliminating documents that do not
contain all three words "the," "brown," and "cow," but this still
leaves many documents.
• To further distinguish them, we might count the number of times
each term occurs in each document and sum them all together;
– the number of times a term occurs in a document is called its TF. How-
ever, because the term "the" is so common, this will tend to incorrectly
emphasize documents which happen to use the word "the" more, without
giving enough weight to the more meaningful terms "brown" and "cow".
– Also the term "the" is not a good keyword to distinguish relevant and non-
relevant documents and terms like "brown" and "cow" that occur rarely
are good keywords to distinguish relevant documents from the non-rele-
vant once.
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 Concluding remarks
• Hence IDF is incorporated which diminishes the weight
of terms that occur very frequently in the collection and
increases the weight of terms that occur rarely.
– This leads to use TF*IDF as a better weighting technique

• On top of that we apply similarity measures to calculate

the distance between document i and query j.
• There are a number of similarity measures; the most
common similarity measure are
• Euclidean distance , Inner or Dot product, Cosine similar-
ity, Dice similarity, Jaccard similarity, etc.
 Similarity Measure
• We now have vectors for all documents in
the collection, a vector for the query, how to t3
compute similarity?
• A similarity measure is a function that com- 1
putes the degree of similarity or distance be-
D1
tween document vector and query vector. Q

• Using a similarity measure between the 2 t1

query and each document:
–It is possible to rank the retrieved docu- t2 D2
ments in the order of presumed relevance.
–It is possible to enforce a certain threshold
so that the size of the retrieved set can be
controlled.

19
 Intuition
t3
d2

d3
d1
θ
φ
t1

d5
t2
d4

Postulate: Documents that are “close to-

gether”
in the vector space talk about the same things
 Similarity Measure
Desiderata for proximity
1. If d1 is near d2, then d2 is near d1.
2. If d1 near d2, and d2 near d3, then d1 is not far from d3.
3. No document is closer to d than d itself.
– Sometimes it is a good idea to determine the maximum
possible similarity as the “distance” between a document d
and itself
• A similarity measure attempts to compute the distance
between document vector wj and query wq vector.
– The assumption here is that documents whose vectors are close
to the query vector are more relevant to the query than docu-
ments whose vectors are away from the query vector. 21
 Similarity Measure: Techniques
• Euclidean distance
–It is the most common similarity measure. Euclidean dis-
tance examines the root of square differences between
coordinates of a pair of document and query terms.
• Dot product
–The dot product is also known as the scalar product or in-
ner product
–the dot product is defined as the product of the magni-
tudes of query and document vectors
• Cosine similarity (or normalized inner product)
–It projects document and query vectors into a term space
and calculate the cosine angle between these.
22
 Euclidean distance
• Similarity between vectors for the document di and query
q can be computed as:
n
sim(dj,q) = |dj – q| =  (w
i 1
ij  wiq ) 2

where wij is the weight of term i in document j and wiq

is the weight of term i in the query
• Example: Determine the Euclidean distance between
the document 1 vector (0, 3, 2, 1, 10) and query vector
(2, 7, 1, 0, 0). 0 means corresponding term not found in
document or query
2 2 2 2 2
 (0  2)  (3  7)  (2  1)  (1  0)  (10  0) 11 .05
23
• Similarity between vectors for the document di and query
Inner Product
q can be computed as the vector inner product:

sim(dj,q) = dj•q = wij · wiq

n

 i 1of term i in document j and wiq

where wij is the weight
is the weight of term i in the query q
• For binary vectors, the inner product is the number of
matched query terms in the document (size of intersec-
tion).
• For weighted term vectors, it is the sum of the products
of the weights of the matched terms.

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 Properties of Inner Product

• Favors long documents with a large number

of unique terms.
– Again, the issue of normalization
• Measures how many terms matched but not
how many terms are not matched.

25
 Inner Product -- Examples
• Binary weight :
–Size of vector = size of vocabulary = 7
Retrieval Database Term Computer Text Manage Data
D 1 1 1 0 1 1 0
Q 1 0 1 0 0 1 1
sim(D, Q) = 3
• Term Weighted:
Retrieval Database Architecture
D1 2 3 5
D2 3 7 1
Q 1 0 2
Inner Product:
Example 1
k2
k1
d2 d6 d7
d4
d5
d3
d1

k1 k2 k3 q  dj k3
d1 1 0 1 2
d2 1 0 0 1
d3 0 1 1 2
d4 1 0 0 1
d5 1 1 1 3
d6 1 1 0 2
d7 0 1 0 1

q 1 1 1 27
Inner Product:
Exercise k1 d2
k2
d6 d7
d4 d5
d3
d1

k1 k2 k3 q  dj k3
d1 1 0 1 ?
d2 1 0 0 ?
d3 0 1 1 ?
d4 1 0 0 ?
d5 1 1 1 ?
d6 1 1 0 ?
d7 0 1 0 ?

q 1 2 3 28
 Cosine similarity
• Measures similarity between d1 and d2 captured by the
cosine of the angle x between them.
 

n
d j q wi , j wi , q
sim( d j , q )     i 1

i 1 w i 1 i ,q
n n
dj q 2
i, j w 2

• Or;  

n
d j d k wi , j wi ,k
sim(d j , d k )     i 1

i 1 w i 1 i,k
n n
d j dk 2
i, j w 2

• The denominator involves the lengths of the vectors

• So the cosine measure is also known as the normalized
inner product 

n 2
Length d j  i 1
wi , j
 Example: Computing Cosine
Similarity
• Let say we have query vector Q = (0.4, 0.8); and also
document D1 = (0.2, 0.7). Compute their similarity us-
ing cosine?

(0.4 * 0.2)  (0.8 * 0.7)

sim(Q, D2 ) 
2 2 2 2
[(0.4)  (0.8) ] * [(0.2)  (0.7) ]
0.64
  0.98
0.42
 Example: Computing Cosine
Similarity
• Let say we have two documents in our corpus; D1 =
(0.8, 0.3) and D2 = (0.2, 0.7). Given query vector Q =
(0.4, 0.8), determine which document is the most rele-
vant one for the query?

1.0
Q
D2
cos 1 0.74 0.8

2
cos  2 0.98
0.6

0.4
1 D1
0.2

0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0

31
 Example
• Given three documents; D1, D2 and D3 with the corre-
sponding TFIDF weight, Which documents are more simi-
lar using the three measurement?

Terms D1 D2 D3
affection 0.996 0.993 0.847
Jealous 0.087 0.120 0.466
gossip 0.017 0.000 0.254

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 Cosine Similarity vs. Inner Product
• Cosine similarity measures the cosine of the angle be-
tween two vectors.
• Inner product normalized by the vector lengths.
  t

dj q   ( wij wiq )
 

i 1
CosSim(dj, q) = t t
dj q  wij  wiq 2 2

i 1 i 1
 
InnerProduct(dj, q) = dj q 

D1 = 2T1 + 3T2 + 5T3 CosSim(D1 , Q) = 10 / (4+9+25)(0+0+4) = 0.81

D2 = 3T1 + 7T2 + 1T3 CosSim(D2 , Q) = 2 / (9+49+1)(0+0+4) = 0.13
Q = 0T1 + 0T2 + 2T3
D1 is 6 times better than D2 using cosine similarity but only 5 times
better using inner product. 33
 Exercises
• A database collection consists of 1 million documents, of
which 200,000 contain the term holiday while 250,000
contain the term season. A document repeats holiday 7
times and season 5 times. It is known that holiday is re-
peated more than any other term in the document. Cal-
culate the weight of both terms in this document using
three different term weight methods. Try with
(i) normalized and unnormalized TF;
(ii) TF*IDF based on normalized and unnormalized TF

34