A Study on Context–based Retrieval Trends and Techniques

Abstract

With the tremendous growth of the Web, information “Big Bang” has been taken place on the Internet. Search Engines have become
one of the most helpful tools for obtaining useful information from the “Big Bang”. Increasing growth of information volume in the Internet
causes an increasing need to develop automatic methods for retrieval of documents and ranking them according to their relevance to the query.
Although various methods for the efficient retrieval of information were presented, still the end users are struggling to get the desired result. At
present the major issues in searching are (a) topic diffusion: results returned by a keyword based search, fall into multiple topic areas, which are
not interested to users; (b) there is no effective scoring mechanism; so the users are forced to scan a large result set, which leads them to miss the
important ones. To resolve these issues context – based retrieval is used. This paper explores the research trends and techniques by reviewing
various approaches and lists the research issues in this field.

Keywords: context-based retrieval; information retrieval; ontology-based search; relation-based search; similarity