Title: Query Expansion Techniques for Information Retrieval: a Survey,
Abstract: With the ever increasing size of web, relevant information extraction on the
Internet with a query formed by a few keywords has become a big challenge. To
overcome this, query expansion (QE) plays a crucial role in improving the
Internet searches, where the user's initial query is reformulated to a new
query by adding new meaningful terms with similar significance. QE -- as part
of information retrieval (IR) -- has long attracted researchers' attention. It
has also become very influential in the field of personalized social document,
Question Answering over Linked Data (QALD), and, Text Retrieval Conference
(TREC) and REAL sets. This paper surveys QE techniques in IR from 1960 to 2017
with respect to core techniques, data sources used, weighting and ranking
methodologies, user participation and applications (of QE techniques) --
bringing out similarities and differences.