Information retrievalInformation retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.
Word embeddingIn natural language processing (NLP), a word embedding is a representation of a word. The embedding is used in text analysis. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning. Word embeddings can be obtained using language modeling and feature learning techniques, where words or phrases from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers.
Distributional semanticsDistributional semantics is a research area that develops and studies theories and methods for quantifying and categorizing semantic similarities between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in large samples of language data. The basic idea of distributional semantics can be summed up in the so-called distributional hypothesis: linguistic items with similar distributions have similar meanings. The distributional hypothesis in linguistics is derived from the semantic theory of language usage, i.
Cosine similarityIn data analysis, cosine similarity is a measure of similarity between two non-zero vectors defined in an inner product space. Cosine similarity is the cosine of the angle between the vectors; that is, it is the dot product of the vectors divided by the product of their lengths. It follows that the cosine similarity does not depend on the magnitudes of the vectors, but only on their angle. The cosine similarity always belongs to the interval For example, two proportional vectors have a cosine similarity of 1, two orthogonal vectors have a similarity of 0, and two opposite vectors have a similarity of -1.
Vector spaceIn mathematics and physics, a vector space (also called a linear space) is a set whose elements, often called vectors, may be added together and multiplied ("scaled") by numbers called scalars. Scalars are often real numbers, but can be complex numbers or, more generally, elements of any field. The operations of vector addition and scalar multiplication must satisfy certain requirements, called vector axioms. The terms real vector space and complex vector space are often used to specify the nature of the scalars: real coordinate space or complex coordinate space.
Relevance (information retrieval)In information science and information retrieval, relevance denotes how well a retrieved document or set of documents meets the information need of the user. Relevance may include concerns such as timeliness, authority or novelty of the result. The concern with the problem of finding relevant information dates back at least to the first publication of scientific journals in the 17th century. The formal study of relevance began in the 20th Century with the study of what would later be called bibliometrics.
Word-sense disambiguationWord-sense disambiguation (WSD) is the process of identifying which sense of a word is meant in a sentence or other segment of context. In human language processing and cognition, it is usually subconscious/automatic but can often come to conscious attention when ambiguity impairs clarity of communication, given the pervasive polysemy in natural language. In computational linguistics, it is an open problem that affects other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, and inference.
Word2vecWord2vec is a technique for natural language processing (NLP) published in 2013. The word2vec algorithm uses a neural network model to learn word associations from a large corpus of text. Once trained, such a model can detect synonymous words or suggest additional words for a partial sentence. As the name implies, word2vec represents each distinct word with a particular list of numbers called a vector.
Latent semantic analysisLatent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular distributional semantics, of analyzing relationships between a set of documents and the terms they contain by producing a set of concepts related to the documents and terms. LSA assumes that words that are close in meaning will occur in similar pieces of text (the distributional hypothesis).
Precision and recallIn pattern recognition, information retrieval, object detection and classification (machine learning), precision and recall are performance metrics that apply to data retrieved from a collection, corpus or sample space. Precision (also called positive predictive value) is the fraction of relevant instances among the retrieved instances. Written as a formula:. Recall (also known as sensitivity) is the fraction of relevant instances that were retrieved. Written as a formula: . Both precision and recall are therefore based on relevance.
Tf–idfIn information retrieval, tf–idf (also TF*IDF, TFIDF, TF–IDF, or Tf–idf), short for term frequency–inverse document frequency, is a numerical statistic that is intended to reflect how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus. It is often used as a weighting factor in searches of information retrieval, text mining, and user modeling. The tf–idf value increases proportionally to the number of times a word appears in the document and is offset by the number of documents in the corpus that contain the word, which helps to adjust for the fact that some words appear more frequently in general.
Semantic similaritySemantic similarity is a metric defined over a set of documents or terms, where the idea of distance between items is based on the likeness of their meaning or semantic content as opposed to lexicographical similarity. These are mathematical tools used to estimate the strength of the semantic relationship between units of language, concepts or instances, through a numerical description obtained according to the comparison of information supporting their meaning or describing their nature.
Euclidean spaceEuclidean space is the fundamental space of geometry, intended to represent physical space. Originally, that is, in Euclid's Elements, it was the three-dimensional space of Euclidean geometry, but in modern mathematics there are Euclidean spaces of any positive integer dimension n, which are called Euclidean n-spaces when one wants to specify their dimension. For n equal to one or two, they are commonly called respectively Euclidean lines and Euclidean planes.
Entity linkingIn natural language processing, entity linking, also referred to as named-entity linking (NEL), named-entity disambiguation (NED), named-entity recognition and disambiguation (NERD) or named-entity normalization (NEN) is the task of assigning a unique identity to entities (such as famous individuals, locations, or companies) mentioned in text. For example, given the sentence "Paris is the capital of France", the idea is to determine that "Paris" refers to the city of Paris and not to Paris Hilton or any other entity that could be referred to as "Paris".
Statistical semanticsIn linguistics, statistical semantics applies the methods of statistics to the problem of determining the meaning of words or phrases, ideally through unsupervised learning, to a degree of precision at least sufficient for the purpose of information retrieval. The term statistical semantics was first used by Warren Weaver in his well-known paper on machine translation. He argued that word sense disambiguation for machine translation should be based on the co-occurrence frequency of the context words near a given target word.
Named-entity recognitionNamed-entity recognition (NER) (also known as (named) entity identification, entity chunking, and entity extraction) is a subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructured text into pre-defined categories such as person names, organizations, locations, medical codes, time expressions, quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc. Most research on NER/NEE systems has been structured as taking an unannotated block of text, such as this one: Jim bought 300 shares of Acme Corp.
Topic modelIn statistics and natural language processing, a topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering the abstract "topics" that occur in a collection of documents. Topic modeling is a frequently used text-mining tool for discovery of hidden semantic structures in a text body. Intuitively, given that a document is about a particular topic, one would expect particular words to appear in the document more or less frequently: "dog" and "bone" will appear more often in documents about dogs, "cat" and "meow" will appear in documents about cats, and "the" and "is" will appear approximately equally in both.
Probabilistic latent semantic analysisProbabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA), also known as probabilistic latent semantic indexing (PLSI, especially in information retrieval circles) is a statistical technique for the analysis of two-mode and co-occurrence data. In effect, one can derive a low-dimensional representation of the observed variables in terms of their affinity to certain hidden variables, just as in latent semantic analysis, from which PLSA evolved.
Bag-of-words modelThe bag-of-words model is a simplifying representation used in natural language processing and information retrieval (IR). In this model, a text (such as a sentence or a document) is represented as the bag (multiset) of its words, disregarding grammar and even word order but keeping multiplicity. The bag-of-words model has also been used for computer vision. The bag-of-words model is commonly used in methods of document classification where the (frequency of) occurrence of each word is used as a feature for training a classifier.
Computational linguisticsComputational linguistics has since 2020s became a near-synonym of either natural language processing or language technology, with deep learning approaches, such as large language models, overperforming the specific approaches previously used in the field. The field overlapped with artificial intelligence since the efforts in the United States in the 1950s to use computers to automatically translate texts from foreign languages, particularly Russian scientific journals, into English.
