Term Proximity

Synonyms

Lexical affinities; Lexical relations

Definition

Term proximity is a form of term dependence based on the distance of terms in a document. A retrieval system using term proximity assigns a higher score to documents in which the query terms appear close to each other.

Key Points

Term proximity is a feature that partially captures the dependence of terms in documents. Information retrievals models are often based on the assumption that terms occur independently of other terms in a document. This assumption is only an approximation to allow the simple mathematical development of retrieval models. There have been, however, several efforts to introduce dependence of terms [4]. Most of the efforts to use term proximity in the past did not result in substantial improvements. Metzler and Croft [2] argued that this can be attributed to the small size of the test collections used in the past, as well as to the fact that previous models required estimating term dependencies for both the...