get cosine similarity between two documents in lucene

Question

Hi

i have built an index in Lucene. I want without specifying a query, just to get a score (cosine similarity or another distance?) between two documents in the index.

For example i am getting from previously opened IndexReader ir the documents with ids 2 and 4. Document d1 = ir.document(2); Document d2 = ir.document(4);

How can i get the cosine similarity between these two documents?

Thank you

Answer 1

When indexing, there's an option to store term frequency vectors.

During runtime, look up the term frequency vectors for both documents using IndexReader.getTermFreqVector(), and look up document frequency data for each term using IndexReader.docFreq(). That will give you all the components necessary to calculate the cosine similarity between the two docs.

An easier way might be to submit doc A as a query (adding all words to the query as OR terms, boosting each by term frequency) and look for doc B in the result set.