Semantic approaches for query expansion: taxonomy, challenges, and future research directions
The internet has been inundated with an ocean of information, and hence, information retrieval systems are failing to provide optimal results to the user. In order to meet the challenge, query expansion techniques have emerged as a game-changer and are improving the results of information retrieval...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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PeerJ Inc.
2025-03-01
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| Series: | PeerJ Computer Science |
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| Online Access: | https://peerj.com/articles/cs-2664.pdf |
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| author | Azzah Allahim Asma Cherif Abdessamad Imine |
| author_facet | Azzah Allahim Asma Cherif Abdessamad Imine |
| author_sort | Azzah Allahim |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | The internet has been inundated with an ocean of information, and hence, information retrieval systems are failing to provide optimal results to the user. In order to meet the challenge, query expansion techniques have emerged as a game-changer and are improving the results of information retrieval significantly. Of late, semantic query expansion techniques have attracted increased interest among researchers since these techniques offer more pertinent and practical results to the users. These allow the user to retrieve more meaningful and useful information from the web. Currently, few research works provide a comprehensive review on semantic query expansion; usually, they cannot provide a full view on recent advances, diversified data application, and practical challenges. Therefore, it is imperative to go deep in review in order to explain these advances and assist researchers with concrete insights for future development. This article represents the comprehensive review of the query expansion methods, with a particular emphasis on semantic approaches. It overviews the recent frameworks that have been developed within a period of 2015–2024 and reviews the limitations of each approach. Further, it discusses challenges that are inherent in the semantic query expansion field and identifies some future research directions. This article emphasizes that the linguistic approach is the most effective and flexible direction for researchers to follow, while the ontology approach better suits domain-specific search applications. This, in turn, means that development of the ontology field may further open new perspectives for semantic query expansion. Moreover, by employing artificial intelligence (AI) and making most of the query context without relying on user intervention, improvements toward the optimal expanded query can be achieved. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-3e3f78f696f24e81880bbed2fd36befd |
| institution | DOAJ |
| issn | 2376-5992 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2025-03-01 |
| publisher | PeerJ Inc. |
| record_format | Article |
| series | PeerJ Computer Science |
| spelling | doaj-art-3e3f78f696f24e81880bbed2fd36befd2025-08-20T03:02:14ZengPeerJ Inc.PeerJ Computer Science2376-59922025-03-0111e266410.7717/peerj-cs.2664Semantic approaches for query expansion: taxonomy, challenges, and future research directionsAzzah Allahim0Asma Cherif1Abdessamad Imine2IT Department, King Abdulaziz University, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Jeddah, Saudi ArabiaIT Department, King Abdulaziz University, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, Jeddah, Saudi ArabiaUniversité de Lorraine, CNRS, Inria, LORIA, Nancy, FranceThe internet has been inundated with an ocean of information, and hence, information retrieval systems are failing to provide optimal results to the user. In order to meet the challenge, query expansion techniques have emerged as a game-changer and are improving the results of information retrieval significantly. Of late, semantic query expansion techniques have attracted increased interest among researchers since these techniques offer more pertinent and practical results to the users. These allow the user to retrieve more meaningful and useful information from the web. Currently, few research works provide a comprehensive review on semantic query expansion; usually, they cannot provide a full view on recent advances, diversified data application, and practical challenges. Therefore, it is imperative to go deep in review in order to explain these advances and assist researchers with concrete insights for future development. This article represents the comprehensive review of the query expansion methods, with a particular emphasis on semantic approaches. It overviews the recent frameworks that have been developed within a period of 2015–2024 and reviews the limitations of each approach. Further, it discusses challenges that are inherent in the semantic query expansion field and identifies some future research directions. This article emphasizes that the linguistic approach is the most effective and flexible direction for researchers to follow, while the ontology approach better suits domain-specific search applications. This, in turn, means that development of the ontology field may further open new perspectives for semantic query expansion. Moreover, by employing artificial intelligence (AI) and making most of the query context without relying on user intervention, improvements toward the optimal expanded query can be achieved.https://peerj.com/articles/cs-2664.pdfQuery expansionSemantic querySemantic webOntology |
| spellingShingle | Azzah Allahim Asma Cherif Abdessamad Imine Semantic approaches for query expansion: taxonomy, challenges, and future research directions PeerJ Computer Science Query expansion Semantic query Semantic web Ontology |
| title | Semantic approaches for query expansion: taxonomy, challenges, and future research directions |
| title_full | Semantic approaches for query expansion: taxonomy, challenges, and future research directions |
| title_fullStr | Semantic approaches for query expansion: taxonomy, challenges, and future research directions |
| title_full_unstemmed | Semantic approaches for query expansion: taxonomy, challenges, and future research directions |
| title_short | Semantic approaches for query expansion: taxonomy, challenges, and future research directions |
| title_sort | semantic approaches for query expansion taxonomy challenges and future research directions |
| topic | Query expansion Semantic query Semantic web Ontology |
| url | https://peerj.com/articles/cs-2664.pdf |
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