Most existing language modeling approaches are based on the term independence hypothesis. To go beyond this assumption, two main directions were investigated. The first one considers the use of the proximity features that capture the degree to which search terms appear close to each other in a document. Another one considers the use of semantic relationships between words. Previous studies have proven that these two types of information, including term proximity features and semantic relationships between words, are both useful to improve retrieval performance. Intuitionally, we can use them i...
