articleACM Transactions on Information SystemsMar 11, 2025Closed access

From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval

Renmin University of China · Tsinghua University

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Abstract

Information Retrieval (IR) systems are crucial tools for users to access information, which have long been dominated by traditional methods relying on similarity matching. With the advancement of pre-trained language models, Generative Information Retrieval (GenIR) emerges as a novel paradigm, attracting increasing attention. Based on the form of information provided to users, current research in GenIR can be categorized into two aspects: (1) Generative Retrieval ( GR ) leverages the generative model’s parameters for memorizing documents, enabling retrieval by directly generating relevant document identifiers without explicit indexing. (2) Reliable Response Generation employs language models to directly…

Citation impact

51
total citations
FWCI
51.22
Percentile
100%
References
251
Citations per year

Authors

7

Topics & keywords

Keywords
  • Generative grammar
  • Matching (statistics)
  • Information retrieval
  • Computer science
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Mathematics
  • Statistics
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