A Survey of Techniques for Improving Information Retrieval through Query Expansion

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of QE techniques in IR. Core techniques, employed data sources, and methodologies used in the process of query expansion are discussed. The output study highlights four main steps concerned with expanding queries: steps related to preprocessing of data sources and term extraction, calculation of weights and ranking of terms, selection of terms, and finally expansion. The most important findings are that only effective text normalization and removal of stopwords provide a real platform for performing QE. The introduction of contextually relevant terms significantly enhanced relevance feedback and thesaurus-based WordNet expansion techniques. They have been shown to significantly improve retrieval effectiveness as has been realized from various experiments conducted over years now. It also uses the manual query expansion techniques and discusses several automated ways in order to improve retrieval effectiveness. This work, by reviewing the related literature and methodologies, gives an overview of how the techniques of query expansion have been evolving with time and achieved better results in IR systems. The survey offers a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in information retrieval, shedding light on the advancements, challenges, and future directions in query expansion research.