I've been using the (Java) Highlighter for Lucene (in the Sandbox package) for some time. However, this isn't really very accurate when it comes to matching the correct terms in search results - it works well for simple queries, for example searching for two separate words will highlight both code fragments in the results.
However, it doesn't act well with more complicated queries. In the simplest case, phrase queries such as "Stack Overflow" will match all occurrences of Stack or Overflow in the highlighting, which gives the impression to the user that it isn't working very well.
I tried applying the fix here but that came with a lot of performance caveats, and at the end of the day was just plain unusable. The performance is especially an issue on wildcard queries. This is due to the way that the highlighting works; instead of just working on the querystring and the text it parses it as Lucene would and then looks for all the matches that Lucene has made; unfortunately this means that for certain wildcard queries it can be looking for matches to 2000+ clauses on large documents, and it's simply not fast enough.
Is there any faster implementation of an accurate highlighter?
There is a new faster highlighter (needs to be patched in but will be part of release 2.9)
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-1522
and a back-reference to this question
You could look into using Solr. http://lucene.apache.org/solr
Solr is a sort of generic search application that uses Lucene and supports highlighting. It's possible that the highlighting in Solr is usable as an API outside of Solr. You could also look at how Solr does it for inspiration.
I've been reading on the subject and came across spanQuery which would return to you the span of the matched term or terms in the field that matched.
Related
I'm looking for an appropriate search engine that I can use my own similarity measure and tokenization approaches in it. Lucene search engine is introduced as a good one for this purpose but I have no idea about that. I searched on the internet about the tutorial of new versions of Lucene search engine but most of the pages are from a few years ago. Some of my questions are as follow:
Is it possible to change the similarity measure, tokenization and Stemming approaches and use self-built classes in the Lucene? If yes, How to do that?
Is there any difference between how we index the text for keywords search or phrasal search? should I make two different index for keyword search and phrasal search? (I think if we remove stop words, it will affect on the result of phrasal search and if I don't remove stop words, it will affect on the result of keyword search, won't it?)
Any information about this topic is appreciated.
This is possible, yes, and we do it on a couple solutions at my workplace. Here is a reasonable tutorial on how to do this. The tutorial uses Solr, which is a good Lucene implementation. To answer your questions directly:
Yes, there is a way to do this by overriding interfaces and providing your own implementation (see tutorial). Tokenization can be done without needing to override classes within Solr's default configuration, depending on how funky you need to get with Tokenization.
Yes, making an index that will return accurate results is a measure in understanding how your users will be searching the index. That having been said, a large part of the complexity in how queries search comes from people wanting matching results to float to the top of the results list, which is done via scoring. Given it sounds like you're looking to override the scoring, it may not matter for you. You should note though that by default, Lucene will match on hits to multiple columns higher than a single match exactly on a single column. That means that if you store data across many columns (and you search by default across many columns) your search will get less and less "accurate".
Full text search against a single column tends to be pretty accurate phrase vs words, but you'll end up with a pretty large index.
Here is the Scenario of Lucene Searching,
In Lucene document contains two fields having values "Red" and "Red Feather".
I want to search Red Feathar.
It is returning "Red" as first result. But I want "Red Feather" as first result.
I tried using fuzzy query term matches. but its makes my application slow.
So is there any another way to search Phonetic misspelled word in Lucene?
Thanks,
There are Phonetic matching methods in Lucene, but I think a FuzzyQuery is the right choice for this case. There are a few ways to enhance it's performance:
Are you using Lucene 4.0 or later? FuzzyQuery performance got a huge boost in 4.0.
Set a prefixLength. This forces the first x characters to directly match, which narrows searching for matching terms significantly, and takes better advantage of lucene's indexing methods, leading to significantly improved performance.
If you are using 3.6 or earlier (and can't switch to a more recent version), make sure you set minimumSimilarity
If you are using 4.0 or later, you could try setting maxEdits to 1
I am new to Lucene and my project is to provide specialized search for a set
of booklets. I am using Lucene Java 3.1.
The basic idea is to help people know where to look for information in the (rather
large and dry) booklets by consulting the index to find out what booklet and page numbers match their query. Each Document in my index represents a particular page in one of the booklets.
So far I have been able to successfully scrape the raw text from the booklets,
insert it into an index, and query it just fine using StandardAnalyzer on both
ends.
So here's my general question:
Many queries on the index will involve searching for place names mentioned in the
booklets. Some place names use notational variants. For instance, in the body text
it will be called "Ship Creek" on one page, but in a map diagram elsewhere it might be listed as "Ship Cr." or even "Ship Ck.". What I need to know is how to approach treating the two consecutive words as a single term and add the notational variants as synonyms.
My goal is of course to search with any of the variants and catch all occurrences. If I search for (Ship AND (Cr Ck Creek)) this does not give me what I want because other words may appear between [ship] and [cr]/[ck]/[creek] leading to false positives.
So, in a nutshell I probably still need the basic stuff provided by StandardAnalyzer, but with specific term grouping to emit place names as complete terms and possibly insert synonyms to cover the variants.
For instance, the text "...allowed from the mouth of Ship Creek upstream to ..." would
result in tokens [allowed],[mouth],[ship creek],[upstream]. Perhaps via a TokenFilter along
the way, the [ship creek] term would expand into [ship creek][ship ck][ship cr].
As a bonus it would be nice to treat the trickier text "..except in Ship, Bird, and
Campbell creeks where the limit is..." as [except],[ship creek],[bird creek],
[campbell creek],[where],[limit].
This seems like a pretty basic use case, but it's not clear to me how I might be able to use existing components from Lucene contrib or SOLR to accomplish this. Should the detection and merging be done in some kind of TokenFilter? Do I need a custom Analyzer implementation?
Some of the term grouping can probably be done heuristically [],[creek] is [ creek]
but I also have an exhaustive list of places mentioned in the text if that helps.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
You can use Solr's Synonym Filter. Just set up "creek" to have synonyms "ck", "cr" etc.
I'm not aware of any existing functionality to solve your "bonus" problem.
We have many objects and each objects comes with around 100-200 words description. (for example a book's author name and small summary).
User gives input as series for words. How to implement search with approximate text and minor spelling changes? for example "Joshua Bloch", "Joshua blosh", joshua block" could lead to same text result.
If you are using Lucene for your full-text search, there is a "Did you mean" extension for is probably what you want.
How to implement search with approximate text and minor spelling changes? for example "Joshua Bloch", "Joshua blosh", joshua block" could lead to same text result.
Does your database support Soundex? Soundex will match similar sounding words which seems to fit the example you gave above. Even if your database doesn't have native soundex you can still write an implementation and save the soundex for each author name in a separate field. This can be used to match later.
However Soundex is not a replacement for full text search; it will only help in specific cases likle author name. If you are looking to find some specific text from say, the book's blurb then you are better off with a full text search option (like Postgresql's).
If you are looking for actual implementation of this feature, here is a brilliant program written by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
It also has links to implementations in many other languages including Java, C etc.
You can use the spell checker JOrtho. From the context in your database you can generate a custom dictionary and set it. Then all words that are not in the dictionary and not in your database are mark as wrong spelling.
Instead of Lucene, please check Solr. Lucene is a library which you can use to embed search function in your application. Solr is the actual implementation of Lucene which you can directly plug in to your application via APIs. For most systems, Solr will save dealing with complexity of Lucene.
Apache Lucene may fit your bill. It is high performance, full test search engine library written entirely in Java.
I would like to implement full-text-search in my off-line (android) application to search the user generated list of notes.
I would like it to behave just like Google (since most people are already used to querying to Google)
My initial requirements are:
Fast: like Google or as fast as possible, having 100000 documents with 200 hundred words each.
Searching for two words should only return documents that contain both words (not just one word) (unless the OR operator is used)
Case insensitive (aka: normalization): If I have the word 'Hello' and I search for 'hello' it should match.
Diacritical mark insensitive: If I have the word 'así' a search for 'asi' should match. In Spanish, many people, incorrectly, either do not put diacritical marks or fail in correctly putting them.
Stop word elimination: To not have a huge index meaningless words like 'and', 'the' or 'for' should not be indexed at all.
Dictionary substitution (aka: stem words): Similar words should be indexed as one. For example, instances of 'hungrily' and 'hungry' should be replaced with 'hunger'.
Phrase search: If I have the text 'Hello world!' a search of '"world hello"' should not match it but a search of '"hello world"' should match.
Search all fields (in multifield documents) if no field specified (not just a default field)
Auto-completion in search results while typing to give popular searches. (just like Google Suggest)
How may I configure a full-text-search engine to behave as much as possible as Google?
(I am mostly interested in Open Source, Java and in particular Lucene)
I think Lucene can address your requirements. You should also consider using Solr, which has similar functionality and is much easier to set up.
I will discuss each requirement separately, using Lucene. I believe Solr has similar mechanisms.
Fast: like Google or as fast as possible, having 100000 documents with 200 hundred words each.
This is a reasonable index size both for Lucene and Solr, enabling retrieval at several tens of milliseconds per query.
Searching for two words should only return documents that contain both words (not just one word) (unless the OR operator is used)
You can do that using a BooleanQuery with MUST as default in Lucene.
The next four requirements can be handled by customizing a Lucene Analyzer:
Case insensitive (aka: normalization): If I have the word 'Hello' and I search for 'hello' it should match.
A LowerCaseFilter can be used for this.
Diacritical mark insensitive: If I have the word 'así' a search for 'asi' should match. In Spanish, many people, incorrectly, either do not put diacritical marks or fail in correctly putting them.
This requires Unicode normalization followed by diacritic removal. You can build a custom Analyzer for this.
Stop word elimination: To not have a huge index meaningless words like 'and', 'the' or 'for' should not be indexed at all.
A StopFilter removes stop words in Lucene.
Dictionary substitution (aka: stem words): Similar words should be indexed as one. For example, instances of 'hungrily' and 'hungry' should be replaced with 'hunger'.
Lucene has many Snowball Stemmers. One of them may be appropriate.
Phrase search: If I have the text 'Hello world!' a search of '"world hello"' should not match it but a search of '"hello world"' should match.
This is covered by the Lucene PhraseQuery specialized query.
As you can see, Lucene covers all of the required functionality. To get a more general picture, I suggest the book Lucene in Action, The Apache Lucene Wiki or The Lucid Imagination Site.
A lot of these behaviors are default for Lucene. The first (including all terms) is not, but you can force this behavior by setting the default operator:
MultiFieldQueryParser parser = new MultiFieldQueryParser(fields, new StandardAnalyzer());
parser.setDefaultOperator(QueryParser.AND_OPERATOR);
I know that items 2, 4, and 6 are possible, and IIRC, they happen by default. I'm not sure about items 3 and 5, but Lucene offers a ton of customization options, so I'd suggest implementing a proof-of-concept with your data to see if it meets these requirements as well.
Buy a Google Search Appliance. Or, as the comments say, use Lucene like you already mentioned.
HyperSQL is a pure-java SQL implementation that can be ran quite easily, as can SQLite. You could use their full-text capabilities and querying to re-create the wheel, but as the other commenters have pointed out an existing implementation is probably best.
Unless you buy a search engine, you have Lucene, Nutch, Apache Solr and few others.