Practice question · True or false
Comparing documents by Euclidean distance between their word-count vectors makes the comparison independent of document length.
Hints
- What happens to the vector when a document is twice as long?
- Distance grows with magnitude; angle does not.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. Doubling every count doubles the vector's magnitude, so Euclidean distance grows even though the document is about the same thing. Cosine similarity looks only at the angle and is unaffected, which is why it is the standard for text, comparing what a document is about rather than how much of it there is.
Practise Dot Product and Orthogonality
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