Searchkick stemming - elasticsearch

Question

Using searchkick and see that a search for "animals" is returning results for "anime" because of their stem "anim". Does anyone have any suggestions on how to improve these results?
I see the in docs you can do something like
exclude_queries = {
"animals" => ["anime"],
}
Product.search query, exclude: exclude_queries[query]
But it seems like a lot of work to keep a running list for all of the bad ones like this.
Wondering if I need to change the stemmer?

Answer 1

Looks like instead of standard analyzer which doesn't stem the tokens somehow you are using the english analyzer which uses the stemmer, causing the stemmed tokens as shown below:
POST http://{{hostname}}:{{port}}/{{index-name}}/_analyze
{
"text" : "animals",
"analyzer" : "english"
}
{
"tokens": [
{
"token": "anim",
"start_offset": 0,
"end_offset": 5,
"type": "<ALPHANUM>",
"position": 0
}
]
}
The standard analyzer(Default on text field) generates non-stemmed tokens
{
"text" : "animals",
"analyzer" : "standard"
}
{
"tokens": [
{
"token": "animals",
"start_offset": 0,
"end_offset": 7,
"type": "<ALPHANUM>",
"position": 0
}
]
}
If you use standard analyzer you will not the stemmed form but then running will not produce run stemmed form to token and searching for running will not produce results for run, runs etc. Its a trade-off and according to your business requirements you need to choose and modify the analyzers.

Answer 2

I might try something like this. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/master/mixing-exact-search-with-stemming.html
Update
Ankane at searchkick gem was kind enough to add a feature to help with this. As of 4.4.1 you can do this.
class Product < ApplicationRecord
searchkick stemmer_override: ["anime => anime"]
end
This will prevent "anime" from being stemmed to "anim". So it won't show up in the "animals" search results.