SEMANTIC FIELD: A THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE OF MODELING INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Abstract

Information retrieval has been paid much attention and it is widely studied and applied in real world paradigms. For various aspects of information retrieval, various approaches have been proposed from various perspectives. It is necessary to provide a formally-unified and physically-interpretable model for classical problems in information retrieval (e.g., document classification, authority-page selection, and keyword extraction, etc.). In this paper we propose a theoretical model, called semantic field, inspired by the theories of lexical semantics and electrostatic field. Based on this physical model, information retrieval can be viewed from a theoretical perspective and interpreted by people's physical intuitions and natural heuristics. Centered on the concept of semantic field, we give some relevant properties, including semantic affinity, semantic coacervation degree and radiation of a semantic source. As the representative application of the proposed semantic field model, a novel method for automatic keyword extraction is discussed, and the feasibility is verified by corresponding experiments.