Agglomeration and Elimination of Terms for Dimensionality Reduction

The vector space model is the usual representation of texts database for computational treatment. However, in such representation synonyms and/or related terms are treated as independent. Furthermore, there are some terms that do not add any information at all to the set of text documents, on the contrary they even might harm the performance of the information retrieval techniques. In an attempt to reduce this problem, some techniques have been proposed in the literature. In this work we present a method to tackle this problem. In order to validate our approach, we carried out a series of experiments on four databases and we compare the achieved results with other well known techniques. The evaluation results is such that our method obtained in all cases a better or equal performance compared to the other literature techniques.