Natural Language Processing Techniques for Information Retrieval Enhancing Search Engines with Semantic Understanding

This paper investigates new Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods which seek to improve information retrieval systems via semantic knowledge and focuses on enhancing search engines. The proposed ideas focus on reducing the size of the model (one of the biggest problems with large models), training it on domain-specific knowledge (the right knowledge is important for the real application) and ways to efficiently deal with unstructured data (this is also a key issue against NLP frameworks). The study highlights the need for hybrid models that combine generalization and specificity, fast algorithms for big data sets, and automated knowledge extraction. They include cross-lingual approaches, rapid learning in out-of-distribution domains, and human-centered design of AI systems. The end objective of this work is to create a semantic search engine which is adaptive, scalable and flexible; intent aware, and query ambiguity tolerant; improving semantic richness in results tailored to datasets of varying size; hence promising complementary applications of Natural Language Processing to information retrieval.