Wildcard for terms in phrase - Lucene - lucene

Google's query syntax allows to search phrases like "as * as a skyscraper" where the asterisk can match any term (or terms). Is there a way to achieve the same thing in Lucene? The proximity operator ~ could be of use but it is not what I exactly want.

Try a SpanNearQuery. Mark Miller's SpanQuery Blog Post explains how to use it, and the examples are similar to what you describe.

Related

Cloudant Search: Why are my wildcards not working?

I have a Cloudant database with a search index. In the search index I index the titles of my documents. For instance, search for 'rijkspersoneel':
http://wetten.cloudant.com/regelingen/_design/RegelingInfo/_search/regeling?q=title:rijkspersoneel
Returns 48 rows.
However, when I replace the 'o' with a ? wildcard:
http://wetten.cloudant.com/regelingen/_design/RegelingInfo/_search/regeling?q=title:rijkspers?neel
I get 0 results. Why is that? The Cloudant docs say that this should match 'rijkspersoneel' as well!
My previous answer was definitely mistaken. Internal wildcads do appear to be supported. Try:
title:rijkspe*on*
title rijksper?on*
Fairly sure what is happening here is an analysis issue. Fairly sure you are using a stemming analyzer. I'm not really all the familiar with cloudant and their implementation of this, but in Lucene, wildcard queries are not subject to the same analysis as term queries. I'm guessing that your analysis of this field includes a stemmer, in which case "rijkspersoneel" is actually indexed as "rijkspersone".
So, when you search for
rijkspersonee*
or
rijkper?oneel
Since the "el" is missing from the end in the indexed form, you find no matches. When just searching for rijkpersoneel it does get analyzed though, and you search for the stemmed form of the word, and will find matches.
Stemming and wildcards just don't get along.

SQL - searching database with the LIKE operator

Given your data stored somewhere in a database:
Hello my name is Tom I like dinosaurs to talk about SQL.
SQL is amazing. I really like SQL.
We want to implement a site search, allowing visitors to enter terms and return relating records. A user might search for:
Dinosaurs
And the SQL:
WHERE articleBody LIKE '%Dinosaurs%'
Copes fine with returning the correct set of records.
How would we cope however, if a user mispells dinosaurs? IE:
Dinosores
(Poor sore dino). How can we search allowing for error in spelling? We can associate common misspellings we see in search with the correct spelling, and then search on the original terms + corrected term, but this is time consuming to maintain.
Any way programatically?
Edit
Appears SOUNDEX could help, but can anyone give me an example using soundex where entering the search term:
Dinosores wrocks
returns records instead of doing:
WHERE articleBody LIKE '%Dinosaurs%' OR articleBody LIKE '%Wrocks%'
which would return squadoosh?
If you're using SQL Server, have a look at SOUNDEX.
For your example:
select SOUNDEX('Dinosaurs'), SOUNDEX('Dinosores')
Returns identical values (D526) .
You can also use DIFFERENCE function (on same link as soundex) that will compare levels of similarity (4 being the most similar, 0 being the least).
SELECT DIFFERENCE('Dinosaurs', 'Dinosores'); --returns 4
Edit:
After hunting around a bit for a multi-text option, it seems that this isn't all that easy. I would refer you to the link on the Fuzzt Logic answer provided by #Neil Knight (+1 to that, for me!).
This stackoverflow article also details possible sources for implentations for Fuzzy Logic in TSQL. Once respondant also outlined Full text Indexing as a potential that you might want to investigate.
Perhaps your RDBMS has a SOUNDEX function? You didn't mention which one was involved here.
SQL Server's SOUNDEX
Just to throw an alternative out there. If SSIS is an option, then you can use Fuzzy Lookup.
SSIS Fuzzy Lookup
I'm not sure if introducing a separate "search engine" is possible, but if you look at products like the Google search appliance or Autonomy, these products can index a SQL database and provide more searching options - for example, handling misspellings as well as synonyms, search results weighting, alternative search recommendations, etc.
Also, SQL Server's full-text search feature can be configured to use a thesaurus, which might help:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms142491.aspx
Here is another SO question from someone setting up a thesaurus to handle common misspellings:
FORMSOF Thesaurus in SQL Server
Short answer, there is nothing built in to most SQL engines that can do dictionary-based correction of "fat fingers". SoundEx does work as a tool to find words that would sound alike and thus correct for phonetic misspellings, but if the user typed in "Dinosars" missing the final U, or truly "fat-fingered" it and entered "Dinosayrs", SoundEx would not return an exact match.
Sounds like you want something on the level of Google Search's "Did you mean __?" feature. I can tell you that is not as simple as it looks. At a 10,000-foot level, the search engine would look at each of those keywords and see if it's in a "dictionary" of known "good" search terms. If it isn't, it uses an algorithm much like a spell-checker suggestion to find the dictionary word that is the closest match (requires the fewest letter substitutions, additions, deletions and transpositions to turn the given word into the dictionary word). This will require some heavy procedural code, either in a stored proc or CLR Db function in your database, or in your business logic layer.
You can also try the SubString(), to eliminate the first 3 or so characters . Below is an example of how that can be achieved
SELECT Fname, Lname
FROM Table1 ,Table2
WHERE substr(Table1.Fname, 1,3) || substr(Table1.Lname,1 ,3) = substr(Table2.Fname, 1,3) || substr(Table2.Lname, 1 , 3))
ORDER BY Table1.Fname;

not query in lucene

i need to do not queries on my lucene index. Lucene currently allows not only when we have two or more terms in the query:
So I can do something like:
country:canada not sweden
but I can't run a query like:
country:not sweden
Could you please let me know if there is some efficient solution for this problem
Thanks
A very late reply, but it might be useful for somebody else later:
*:* AND NOT country:sweden
IF I'm not mistaken this should do a logical "AND" with all documents and the documents with a country that is different from "sweden".
Try with the following query in the search box:
NOT message:"warning"
message being the search field
Please check answer for similar question. The solution is to use MatchAllDocsQuery.
The short answer is that this is not possible using the standard Lucene.
Lucene does not allow NOT queries as a single term for the same reason it does not allow prefix queries - to perform either, the engine would have to look through each document to ascertain whether the document is/is not a hit. It has to look through each document because it cannot use the search term as the key to look up documents in the inverted index (used to store the indexed documents).
To take your case as an example:
To search for not sweden, the simplest (and possibly most efficient) approach would be to search for sweden and then "invert" the result set to return all documents that are not in that result set. Doing this would require finding all the required (ie. not in the result set) documents in the index, but without a key to look them up by. This would be done by iterating over the documents in the index - a task it is not optimised for, and hence speed would suffer.
If you really need this functionality, you could maintain your own list of items when indexing, so that a not sweden search becomes a sweden search using Lucene, followed by an inversion of the results using your set of items.
OK, I see what you are trying to do.
You can use it as a query refinement since there are no unary Boolean operators in Lucene. Despite the answers above, I believe this is a better and most forward approach (note the space before the wildcard):
&query= *&qf=-country:Canada

Question related to phrase search in lucene/solr?

I have question is it possible to perform a phrase search with wild cards in solr/lucene as if i have two queries both have exactly same results.
One is:
+Contents:"change market"
and the other is:
+Contents:"change* market"
I assumed the second should match "changes market", but it does not return any matches.
You can do this in Lucene with ComplexPhraseQueryParser. Solr has facility to plug in custom query parser with QParserPlugin. You can possibly use these two to have desired functionality with Solr as well.
IMO it is not possible to search for wild cards with in phrase.
You might want to consider using two queries with proximity search.(q=change* market&qs=1)
http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrRelevancyFAQ#How_can_I_search_for_one_term_near_another_term_.28say.2C_.22batman.22_and_.22movie.22.29

Lucene Fuzzy Match on Phrase instead of Single Word

I'm trying to do a fuzzy match on the Phrase "Grand Prarie" (deliberately misspelled) using Apache Lucene. Part of my issue is that the ~ operator only does fuzzy matches on single word terms and behaves as a proximity match for phrases.
Is there a way to do a fuzzy match on a phrase with lucene?
Lucene 3.0 has ComplexPhraseQueryParser that supports fuzzy phrase query. This is in the contrib package.
Came across this through Google and felt solutions where not what I was after.
In my case, solution was to simply repeat the search sequence against the solr API.
So for example if I was looking for: title_t to include match for "dog~" and "cat~", I added some manual code to generate query as:
((title_t:dog~) and (title_t:cat~))
It might just be what above queries are about, however links seems dead.
There's no direct support for a fuzzy phrase, but you can simulate it by explicitly enumerating the fuzzy terms and then adding them to a MultiPhraseQuery. The resulting query would look like:
<MultiPhraseQuery: "grand (prarie prairie)">