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Up to this point, we've been concerned only with the total number of
times a word occurs across the entire corpus. Karen Sparck Jones has
observed that, from a discrimination point of view, what we'd really
like to know is the number of documents containing a keyword.
This thinking underlies the INVERSE DOCUMENT FREQUENCY (IDF)
weighting:
The basis for IDF weighting is the observation that people
tend to express their information needs using rather broadly defined,
frequently occurring terms, whereas it is the more specific, i.e.,
low-frequency terms that are likely to be of particular importance in
identifying relevant material. This is because the number of documents
relevant to a query is generally small, and thus any frequently
occurring terms must necessarily occur in many irrelevant documents;
infrequently occurring terms have a greater probability of occurring in
relevant documents --- and should thus be considered as being of greater
potential when searching a database. [SparckJones97] \eq
Rather than
looking at the raw occurrence frequencies, we will aggregate occurrences
within any document and consider only the { number of documents} in
which a keyword occurs. IDF proposes, again using a ``statistical
interpretation of term specificity'' [SparckJones72] that the value of a
keyword varies inversely with the $\log$ of the number of documents in
which it occurs: w_{kd}=f_{kd} * \left(\log {\mathname{Norm} \over D_k}
+ 1\right) where $D_{k}$ is defined in Equation (FOAref) .
The
formula in (FOAref) is still not fully specified, in that the
count \( D_{k} \) must be normalized with respect to a constant \(
\mathname{Norm} \). We could normalize with respect to the total number
of documents in the corpus [SparckJones72] [ Croft79] ; another possibility is to
normalize against the maximum document frequency (i.e., the most
documents any keyword appears in) [SparckJones79a] [SparckJones79b] .
\mathname{Norm}=\left\{ \begin{array}{ll} \mathname{\mathname{NDoc}}
&[SparckJones72] \\ %
\stackunder{k}{\mathname{argmax}} D_k &[SparckJones79] \\
{\mathname{argmax}_{k}} D_k &[SparckJones79a] [SparckJones79b] \\ \right.
Today
the most common form of IDF weighting is that used by Robertson and
Sparck Jones [Robertson76] ,
which normalizes with respect to the number of documents not containing
a keyword $(\mathname{NDoc}- D_k)$ and adds a constant of $\frac{1}{2}$
to both numerator and denominator to moderate extreme values:
w_{kd}=f_{kd} * \left(\log {(\mathname{NDoc}- D_k)+0.5\over D_k +
0.5}\right)
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Inverse document frequency