A Comprehensive Survey on Query Expansion Techniques, their Issues and Challenges

Abstract

In order to improve the retrieval performance, the process of Query expansion is performed on the original user’s query in order to reformulate the user’s query. The basis of these query expansion techniques is to expand the query by adding the terms, which are in close proximity to the original query terms. Various query expansion techniques do not consider the context of the terms present in the user’s query which can result in low precision and recall due to the ambiguity and vagueness of terms present in the query. Through this paper, a comprehensive survey is presented to study the various query expansion techniques proposed in literature by researchers and the various keyholes keyholes in the current scenario.