Better way of calculating document Similarity using Lucene

java, lucene, similarity

Solution

As I told you in my comment, I think you made a mistake somewhere. The vectors actually contain the `<word,frequency>` pairs, not `words` only. Therefore, when you delete the sentence, only the frequency of the corresponding words are subtracted by 1 (the words after are not shifted). Consider the following example:

Document a:

A B C A A B C. D D E A B. D A B C B A.

Document b:

A B C A A B C. D A B C B A.

Vector a:

A:6, B:5, C:3, D:3, E:1

Vector b:

A:5, B:4, C:3, D:1, E:0

Which result in the following similarity measure:

(6*5+5*4+3*3+3*1+1*0)/(Sqrt(6^2+5^2+3^2+3^2+1^2) Sqrt(5^2+4^2+3^2+1^2+0^2))=
62/(8.94427*7.14143)=
0.970648

Edit I think your source code is not working as well. Consider the following code which works fine with the above example:

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;

public class DocumentVector {
    Map<String, Integer> wordMap = new HashMap<String, Integer>();

    public void incCount(String word) {
        Integer oldCount = wordMap.get(word);
        wordMap.put(word, oldCount == null ? 1 : oldCount + 1);
    }

    double getCosineSimilarityWith(DocumentVector otherVector) {
        double innerProduct = 0;
        for(String w: this.wordMap.keySet()) {
            innerProduct += this.getCount(w) * otherVector.getCount(w);
        }
        return innerProduct / (this.getNorm() * otherVector.getNorm());
    }

    double getNorm() {
        double sum = 0;
        for (Integer count : wordMap.values()) {
            sum += count * count;
        }
        return Math.sqrt(sum);
    }

    int getCount(String word) {
        return wordMap.containsKey(word) ? wordMap.get(word) : 0;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String doc1 = "A B C A A B C. D D E A B. D A B C B A.";
        String doc2 = "A B C A A B C. D A B C B A.";

        DocumentVector v1 = new DocumentVector();
        for(String w:doc1.split("[^a-zA-Z]+")) {
            v1.incCount(w);
        }

        DocumentVector v2 = new DocumentVector();
        for(String w:doc2.split("[^a-zA-Z]+")) {
            v2.incCount(w);
        }

        System.out.println("Similarity = " + v1.getCosineSimilarityWith(v2));
    }

}

Problem

Original source