A Survey of Information Retrieval Techniques

The explosive growth of resources stored in various forms and transmitted over the internet has necessitated researches into information retrieval technologies. The major information retrieval mechanisms commonly employed include vector space model, Boolean model, Fuzzy Set model, and probabilistic retrieval model. These models are used to find similarities between the query and the documents to retrieve documents that reflect the query. These approaches are based on key-word, which uses lists of keywords to describe the information content. In this paper, a survey of these models is provided in order to understand their working mechanisms and shortcomings. This understanding is vital as it facilitates the choice of an information retrieval technique, based on the underlying requirements. The results of this survey revealed that the current information retrieval models fall short of the expectations in one way or the other. As such, they are not ideal for high precision information retrieval applications.