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Thursday, May 8, 9:30 am in MTH 3206, University of Maryland, College Park

Information retrieval via limited-memory matrix methods

Dr. Tamara G. Kolda

Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park

With ever larger collections of documents available electronically, a need has arisen for fast and efficient search engines. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) approximates a matrix representing a document collection using the truncated SVD; this allows automatic recognition of latent relationships between words and leads to a more efficient search engine. We propose replacing the SVD with what we call the semi-discrete decomposition (SDD). The resulting SDD-based LSI performs as well as the SVD-based method, requires substantially less storage, and processes queries faster. Furthermore, the SDD is easy to update when new documents are added to the collection. This is joint work with Dianne P. O'Leary.