1. A computer-based method for automatically compensating for stop words contained in documents during a query of the documents, the method comprising: (a) generating an abstract mathematical space based on documents included in a collection of documents, wherein each document has a representation in the abstract mathematical space; (b) receiving a user query; (c) generating a representation of the user query in the abstract mathematical space; (d) computing a similarity between the representation of the user query and the representation of each document, wherein computing a similarity between the representation of the user query and the representation of a first document in the collection of documents comprises applying a weighting function to a value associated with a frequently occurring word contained in the first document, thereby automatically compensating for the frequently occurring word contained in the first document; and (e) displaying a result based on the similarity computations.