Limitations
The vector space model has the following limitations:
- Long documents are poorly represented because they have poor similarity values (a small scalar product and a large dimensionality)
- Search keywords must precisely match document terms; word substrings might result in a "false positive match"
- Semantic sensitivity; documents with similar context but different term vocabulary won't be associated, resulting in a "false negative match".
- The order in which the terms appear in the document is lost in the vector space representation.
- Assumes terms are statistically independent
- Weighting is intuitive but not very formal
Many of these difficulties can, however, be overcome by the integration of various tools, including mathematical techniques such as singular value decomposition and lexical databases such as WordNet.
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—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)