March 21, 2001

Applications of Orthogona Decomposition in Information Retrieval -or- Taking a Closer Look at LSA
Jim Martin and Liz Jessup, CU Computer Science

Abstract.

LSA is a mathematical approach to the discovery of similarity relationships among documents, fragments of documents, and the words that occur within collections. Originally applied in the context of ad-hoc information retrieval, LSA has since been applied to a wide variety of text-based tasks. Despite the apparent success of these applications, there are a large number of unanswered questions that bear on where and in what manner LSA should be used. In this talk, we'll first discuss some of these issues in the context of LSA's original application context, and then make some suggestions as to where it is and is not reasonable to use LSA.