Text retrieval using linear algebra : an honors thesis [(HONRS 499)]

Text retrieval is an important area of research. As information and methods of its storage have proliferated, the need to have efficient methods of locating subsets of this information has increased as well.The Internet is serving to catapult the size of present-day text collections past those of only fifty years ago. Accordingly, Internet search engines are a hotbed for information retrieval research.A widely-researched text searching method involves modeling a text collection in a term-bydocument matrix, and evaluating the documents' relevance to a query with simple linear algebra.This document presents one such system, the possibilities for future research incorporating ideas of that system, and computer code with a Web interface, written in C++ and Perl, that implements the Web search engine.