Dimensionality reduction techniques like random projection and latent semantic indexing (LSI) can reduce the number of dimensions in a document vector space while approximately preserving distances. Random projection selects random orthogonal projection axes to map vectors to a lower-dimensional space. LSI uses singular value decomposition to identify related terms and documents, projecting the vector space to its principal components to group semantically similar words. LSI provides a better approximation than random projection by exploiting relationships in the data. Dimensionality reduction speeds up information retrieval tasks like computing document similarities and ranking query results.