Hybrid pre-query term expansion using latent semantic analysis

Latent semantic retrieval methods (unlike vector space methods) take the document and query vectors and map them into a topic space to cluster related terms and documents. This produces a more precise retrieval but also a long query time. We present a new method of document retrieval which allows us to process the latent semantic information into a hybrid latent semantic-vector space query mapping. This mapping automatically expands the users query based on the latent semantic information in the document set. This expanded query is processed using a fast vector space method. Since we have the latent semantic data in a mapping, we are able to store and retrieve vector information in the same fast manner that the vector space method offers. Multiple mappings are combined to produce hybrid latent semantic retrieval which provide precision results 5% greater than the vector space method and fast query times.