This article surveys recent research in the area of language modeling (sometimes called statistical language modeling) approaches to information retrieval. Language modeling is a formal probabilistic retrieval framework with roots in speech recognition and natural language processing. The underlying assumption of language modeling is that human language generation is a random process; the goal is to model that process via a generative statistical model. In this article, we discuss current research in the application of language modeling to information retrieval, the role of semantics in the language modeling framework, cluster-based language models, use of language modeling for XML retrieval and future trends.