A Literature Survey on Automatic Query Expansion for Effective Retrieval Task

In this paper, we present a survey of important work done on automatic query expansion. Automatic query expansion is the process of automatically supplementing additional terms or phrases to the original query and is considered an extremely promising technique to improve the retrieval effectiveness. In this survey, we discussed a large number of recent approaches to automatic query expansion that include linguistic based, corpus-specific based, query-specific based and search log based approaches. Some of them use lexical resource such as WordNet and other use search log and web data for query expansion. The following questions are also addressed in this work. Why the query expansion is important for information retrieval? What are the main steps of automatic query expansion? What approaches of automatic query expansion are available and how do they compare? What are the critical issues and research directions of automatic query expansion?