1. A method to apply a query to a set of documents, comprising: reconstructing a document term matrix XεR N×M by minimizing reconstruction errors with min ∥X−UA∥, where A is a fixed projection matrix and U is a column orthogonal matrix; determining a loss function and parameter gradients to generate U; fixing U while determining the loss function and sparse regularization constraints on the projection matrix A; generating parameter coefficients and generating a sparse projection matrix A; and generating a Sparse Latent Semantic Analysis (Sparse SLA) model and applying the model to a set of documents and displaying documents matching a query.