The influence of indexing practices and weighting algorithms on document spaces

Index modeling and computer simulation techniques are used to examine the influence of indexing frequency distributions, indexing exhaustivity distributions, and three weighting methods on hypothetical document spaces in a vector‐based information retrieval (IR) system. The way documents are indexed plays an important role in retrieval. The authors demonstrate the influence of different indexing characteristics on document space density (DSD) changes and document space discriminative capacity for IR. Document environments that contain a relatively higher percentage of infrequently occurring terms provide lower density outcomes than do environments where a higher percentage of frequently occurring terms exists. Different indexing exhaustivity levels, however, have little influence on the document space densities. A weighting algorithm that favors higher weights for infrequently occurring terms results in the lowest overall document space densities, which allows documents to be more readily differentiated from one another. This in turn can positively influence IR. The authors also discuss the influence on outcomes using two methods of normalization of term weights (i.e., means and ranges) for the different weighting methods.