A system and method for determining a similarity between a document and a query includes building a weight vector for each of a plurality of documents in a corpus of documents stored in memory and building a weight vector for a query input into a document retrieval system. A weight matrix is generated which distinguishes between relevant documents and lower ranked documents by comparing document/query tuples using a gradient step approach. A similarity score is determined between weight vectors of the query and documents in a corpus by determining a product of a document weight vector, a query weight vector and the weight matrix.