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Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide
book

Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide

by Clinton Gormley, Zachary Tong
January 2015
Intermediate to advanced
724 pages
13h 21m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Elasticsearch: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 19. Identifying Words

A word in English is relatively simple to spot: words are separated by whitespace or (some) punctuation. Even in English, though, there can be controversy: is you’re one word or two? What about o’clock, cooperate, half-baked, or eyewitness?

Languages like German or Dutch combine individual words to create longer compound words like Weißkopfseeadler (white-headed sea eagle), but in order to be able to return Weißkopfseeadler as a result for the query Adler (eagle), we need to understand how to break up compound words into their constituent parts.

Asian languages are even more complex: some have no whitespace between words, sentences, or even paragraphs. Some words can be represented by a single character, but the same single character, when placed next to other characters, can form just one part of a longer word with a quite different meaning.

It should be obvious that there is no silver-bullet analyzer that will miraculously deal with all human languages. Elasticsearch ships with dedicated analyzers for many languages, and more language-specific analyzers are available as plug-ins.

However, not all languages have dedicated analyzers, and sometimes you won’t even be sure which language(s) you are dealing with. For these situations, we need good standard tools that do a reasonable job regardless of language.

standard Analyzer

The standard analyzer is used by default for any full-text analyzed string field. If we were to reimplement the standard analyzer ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449358532Errata