Survey of Automatic Query Expansion for Arabic Text Retrieval

Abstract

Information need has been one of the main motivations for a person using a search engine. Queries can represent very different information needs. Ironically, a query can be a poor representation of the information need because the user can find it difficult to express the information need. Query Expansion (QE) is being popularly used to address this limitation. While QE can be considered as a language-independent technique, recent findings have shown that in certain cases, language plays an important role. Arabic is a language with a particularly large vocabulary rich in words with synonymous shades of meaning and has high morphological complexity. This paper, therefore, provides a review on QE for Arabic information retrieval, the intention being to identify the recent state-of-the-art of this burgeoning area. In this review, we primarily discuss statistical QE approaches that include document analysis, search, browse log analyses, and web knowledge analyses, in addition to the semantic QE approaches, which use semantic knowledge structures to extract meaningful word relationships. Finally, our conclusion is that QE regarding the Arabic language is subjected to additional investigation and research due to the intricate nature of this language.