An investigation of the influence of indexing exhaustivity and term distributions on a document space

The authors investigate the influence of index term distributions, and indexing exhaustivity levels on the document space within a visual information retrieval environment called DARE. Using combinations of three levels of term distributions (shallow, observed, steep) and indexing exhaustivity (low, observed, high), hypothetical document sets were generated and projected onto the DARE environment. The results from the simulated document sets demonstrate the importance of term distribution and exhaustivity characteristics on the density of document spaces and their implications for retrieval, particularly when different term weighting schemes are used. The results also demonstrate how different combinations of exhaustivity and term distributions may result in similar document space density characteristics.