In Information Retrieval (IR), whether implicitly or explicitly, queries and
documents are often represented as vectors. However, it may be more beneficial
to consider documents and/or queries as multidimensional objects. Our belief is
this would allow building "truly" interactive IR systems, i.e., where
interaction is fully incorporated in the IR framework.
The probabilistic formalism of quantum physics represents events and
densities as multidimensional objects. This paper presents our first step
towards building an interactive IR framework upon this formalism, by stating
how the first interaction of the retrieval process, when the user types a
query, can be formalised. Our framework depends on a number of parameters
affecting the final document ranking. In this paper we experimentally
investigate the effect of these parameters, showing that the proposed
representation of documents and queries as multidimensional objects can compete
with standard approaches, with the additional prospect to be applied to
interactive retrieval
