Retrieving and ranking of documents from database description

A method, a computer system, and a program product for retrieving and/or ranking documents in a database. The method comprising steps of, providing a document matrix derived from the documents, the matrix including numerical elements derived from the attributes; providing a covariance matrix derived from the document matrix; executing singular value decomposition of the covariance matrix so as to obtain the following formula:K=V (C) VT, wherein K represents the covariance matrix, V represents the matrix consisting of eigenvectors, (C) represents a diagonal matrix, and VT represents a transpose of the matrix V; reducing a dimension of the matrix V using a predetermined number of eigenvectors included in the matrix V, the eigenvectors including an eigenvector corresponding to the largest singular value; reducing a dimension of the document matrix using the dimension reduced matrix V; and retrieving and/or ranking the documents in the database by computing the scalar product between the dimension reduced document matrix and a query vector.