Information Retrieval System: An Overview, Issues, and Challenges

Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) have dramatically changed the ways how people acquire information for their need. Information Retrieval (IR) enables user to find relevant document from collection of countless resources. This article presents an overview of IRS. Objectives of this article is to answer all the basic and specific questions related to IRS. In contrast to other review papers, the authors provide a complete understanding of IR in single paper. Starting from definition and importance it covers retrieval process, performance issues, and comparison among various approaches. This article also includes description of different models along with analysis of their merits and demerits. This article proposes a list of challenges, still unanswered by existing systems. Before offering a conclusion, the major applications of IR are also listed.