Introduction The growth of information and communication technologies has led to an enormous increase in the amount of information produced and stored around the world. Libraries, universities, research institutions, government agencies, businesses, archives, websites, digital repositories, and databases now contain vast quantities of information resources. These resources include books, journal articles, newspapers, reports, conference papers, theses, dissertations, websites, images, audio recordings, videos, research datasets, and other digital materials. Although the availability of large amounts of information is beneficial, it also creates a major challenge. Users may find it difficult to identify the particular information they need when thousands or millions of resources are available. Searching through such collections manually would be extremely time-consuming and, in many cases, impossible. Information retrieval systems were developed to address this problem by ...
