Intermediate · NLP

Vector Space Model

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. A mathematical model for representing text documents as vectors of identifiers, such as index terms.

Technical Definition

A mathematical model for representing text documents as vectors of identifiers, such as index terms.

How it works

The Vector Space Model (VSM) represents text documents and queries as high-dimensional vectors, where each dimension corresponds to a unique term (word or phrase). The values in the vector indicate the importance or frequency of that term. Similarity between documents or between a document and a query is calculated by measuring the proximity (e.g., cosine similarity) of their vectors.

Related Concepts

• Natural language processing (NLP) — A field of AI enabling computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language.
• Embeddings — Dense vector representations of discrete items, capturing their semantic relationships and meanings.
• Semantic Search — A search technology that understands the intent and contextual meaning of queries, rather than just matching keywords.