Learning Elasticsearch

Stemming

Stemming is the process of reducing a derived word into its root word. For example, rain, raining, rained, rainfall has the common root word "rain". When a document is indexed, the root word is stored in the index instead of the actual word. Without stemming, we end up storing rain, raining, rained in the index, and search relevance would be very low. The query terms also go through the stemming process, and the root words are looked up in the index. Stemming increases the likelihood of the user finding what he is looking for. When we query for rain in yosemite, even though the document originally had rainfall, the inverted index will contain term rain.

We can configure stemming in Elasticsearch using Analyzers. We will discuss how ...