Thank you all for the ideas and thanks to the developers for producing such a
great tool. I hadn't considered the "too many clauses" problem in my original
implementation and I'm definitely hitting it.
I decided to use a bi-gram tokenization approach combined with a PhraseQuery to
get the "terms containing" feature. This keeps me from needing N fields each
with different length n-grams at the expense of a little more work at query
time. My indexed field ends up looking like:
in nf fo or rm ma at
and my query for "form" looks like:
"fo or rm"
I build the query using the PhraseQuery object and my bi-gram tokenizer. I
haven't tried to solve single character queries yet, but I don't expect that to
be too much trouble. I'll probably just use a single character tokenization
strategy in another field of the index and make that a special case.
This bi-gram approach actually produces an index smaller than the one I was
getting with my previous algorithm and the search performance is great.
I also had the "too many clauses" problem in my "terms starting with" feature
which used PrefixQuery. I solved this case using this same bi-gram tokenized
field. For this case, I need the user supplied text at the beginning of the
field. So I build a SpanNearQuery with the tokens to get a phrase like query
using spans and then a SpanFirstQuery with the number of tokens to force the
query to only match at the start of the field. So a "starts with" query for
"form" looks like
SpanQuery fo = new SpanTermQuery(new Term(FIELD_CONTAINS, "fo");
SpanQuery or = new SpanTermQuery(new Term(FIELD_CONTAINS, "or");
SpanQuery rm = new SpanTermQuery(new Term(FIELD_CONTAINS, "rm");
SpanQuery form = new SpanNearQuery(new SpanQuery[] {fo, or, rm}, 0, true);
SpanQuery query = new SpanFirstQuery(form, 3);
>From what I read, this strategy will not perform as fast as a prefix query,
>but it will allow me to use arbitrarily short query text without running into
>the "too many clauses" problem.
Thanks again for the suggestions!
Eric
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2006 4:06 AM
To: java-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Re: Partial token matches
Another approach maybe to use n-grams. Index each word as follows
2 gram field
in nf fo or rm ma at
3 gram field
inf nfo for orm rma mat
4 gram field
info nfor form orm rmat
and so on.
To search for term "form" simply search the 4 gram field.
The prefix query approach may suffer from the too many clauses exception if you
have lots of words beginning with, in your exmaple, "form". The approach above
would avoid this but will obviously have a much bigger index size.
Regards
Paul I.
"Eric Isakson"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]
.com> To
<java-user@lucene.apache.org>
26/04/2006 17:20 cc
Subject
Please respond to Partial token matches
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
apache.org
Hi All,
Just wanted to throw out something I'm working on. It is working well for me,
but I wanted to see if anyone can suggest any other alternatives that might
perform better than what I'm doing now.
I have a field in my index that contains keywords (back of the book index
terms) and a UI feature that allows the user to find documents that contain a
partial keyword supplied by the user. So a particular document in my index
might have the token "informat" in the keywords field and the user may supply
"form" in the UI and I should get a match.
My old implementation does not use Lucene and just uses String.matches with a
regular expression that looks like ".*form.*". I reimplemented using Lucene and
just tokenize the field so I get the tokens
informat
nformat
format
ormat
rmat
mat
at
t
Then I use a prefix query to find hits. Both implementations ignore case in the
search and the hit order is controlled by another field that I'm sorting on, so
relevance ranking is not important in this use case. Search time performance is
crucial, time to create the index and index size are not really important. The
index is created statically at application startup or possibly delivered to the
application and is not updated while the application is using it.
Thanks for any suggestions,
Eric
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