juniorNLP
What is TF-IDF?
Updated May 17, 2026
Short answer
TF-IDF measures word importance based on frequency in a document and rarity across documents.
Deep explanation
TF-IDF combines term frequency and inverse document frequency to highlight important words while down-weighting common ones.
Real-world example
Search engines rank documents using TF-IDF scores.
Common mistakes
- Assuming TF-IDF captures semantics.
Follow-up questions
- What is IDF?
- When is TF-IDF insufficient?