On the use of term associations in automatic information retrieval
Gerard Salton · 1986
It has been recognized that single words extracted from natural language texts are not always useful for the representation of information content. Associated or related terms. and comples content identifiers derived from thesauruses and knowledge bases, or constructed by automatic word grouping techniques, have therefore been proposed for text identification purposes.The area of associative content analysis and information retrievl is reviewed in this study. The available experimental evidence shows that none of the existing or proposed methodologies are guaranteed to improve retrieval performance in a replicable manner for document collections in different subject areas. The associative techniques are most valuable for restricted environments covering narrow subject areas, or in iterative search situations where user inputs are available to refine previously available query formulations and search output.