Analysis of a Vector Space Model, Latent Semantic Indexing and Formal Concept Analysis for Information Retrieval

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), a variant of classical Vector Space Model (VSM), is an Information Retrieval (IR) model that attempts to capture the latent semantic relationship between the data items. Mathematical lattices, under the framework of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), represent conceptual hierarchies in data and retrieve the information. However, both LSI and FCA use the data represented in the form of matrices. The objective of this paper is to systematically analyze VSM, LSI and FCA for the task of IR using standard and real life datasets.