Hi Anuragrawal,
Thanks for your patience. Here is the information from our developer team regarding the cosine value:
Multiplying by 0.5 is a part of the normalization process to scale the cosine distance value to a specific range. Typically, the cosine similarity ranges from -1 to 1, where 1 means identical vectors and -1 means completely opposite. By adding 1 and then multiplying by 0.5, the range is transformed to 0 to 1.
Without the multiplication by 0.5, the cosine similarity values will range from -1 to 1 (after adding 1 to the original cosine similarity). This means that a value of -1 indicates completely dissimilar vectors, a value of 0 indicates orthogonality (i.e., the vectors are unrelated), and a value of 1 indicates identical vectors. By multiplying by 0.5, the range is transformed to 0 to 1, which can be easier to interpret: a value closer to 0 indicates greater similarity, and a value closer to 1 indicates greater dissimilarity.
So, while you can certainly compute cosine similarity without the multiplication step, the interpretation of the results will be different. The choice to include this step often depends on the specific requirements of ones application and how you want to interpret the results.
I hope this is helpful to you.
Regards,
Aznie
