TF-IDF

Technology & Computing abbreviation · Artificial Intelligence

TF-IDF
Stands forTerm frequency-inverse document frequency
CategoriesTechnology & Computing

TF-IDF stands for Term frequency-inverse document frequency, an artificial intelligence abbreviation.

A statistic that scores how important a word is to a document within a collection: words frequent in one document but rare across the collection score highest. It is a classic technique for search ranking, keyword extraction and text classification.

Example: TF-IDF ranks "refund" highly in complaint emails because it rarely appears in other messages.

Usage notes

Karen Spärck Jones introduced inverse document frequency in 1972. The related BM25 formula still powers keyword search in Elasticsearch and Lucene and is often combined with embeddings in hybrid search. Very common words such as "the" receive near-zero weight automatically.

More artificial intelligence abbreviations

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  • STT – Speech-to-text
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  • t-SNE – t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding
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  • TTS – Text-to-speech
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  • VLM – Vision-language model
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Edited by the AbbreviationList.com team. Spotted an error or a missing meaning? Contact us.