A Unifying Model of Flexible Queries with Distinct Semantics of Search Term Weights

When querying documents archives there is often the need to specify importance weights of the search terms that define flexible selection condi-tions on documents representation. Several interpretations of the semantics of these weights have been proposed within distinct information retrieval models. In this contribution we define a unifying model of information retrieval based on a vector p-norm, were importance weights with distinct semantics can be specified in flexible queries.