Concept Based Representations as Complement of Bag of Words in Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval models, which do not represent texts merely as collections of the words they contain, but rather as collections of the concepts they contain through synonym sets or latent dimensions, are known as Bag-of-Concepts (BoC) representations. In this paper we use random indexing, which uses co-occurrence information among words to generate semantic context vectors and then represent the documents and queries as BoC. In addition, we use a novel representation, Holographic Reduced Representation, previously proposed in cognitive models, which can encode relations between words. We show that these representations can be successfully used in information retrieval, can associate terms, and when they are combined with the traditional vector space model, they improve effectiveness, in terms of mean average precision.