TY  - JOUR
AB  - The term‐weighting function known as IDF was proposed in 1972, and has since been extremely widely used, usually as part of a TF*IDF function. It is often described as a heuristic, and many papers have been written (some based on Shannon's Information Theory) seeking to establish some theoretical basis for it. Some of these attempts are reviewed, and it is shown that the Information Theory approaches are problematic, but that there are good theoretical justifications of both IDF and TF*IDF in the traditional probabilistic model of information retrieval.
VL  - 60
IS  - 5
SN  - 0022-0418
DO  - 10.1108/00220410410560582
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410410560582
AU  - Robertson Stephen
PY  - 2004
Y1  - 2004/01/01
TI  - Understanding inverse document frequency: on theoretical arguments for IDF
T2  - Journal of Documentation
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 503
EP  - 520
Y2  - 2024/04/25
ER  -