Google style autocomplete & autocorrection with elasticsearch - elasticsearch

Question

I'm trying to achieve google style autocomplete & autocorrection with elasticsearch.
Mappings :
POST music
{
"settings": {
"analysis": {
"filter": {
"nGram_filter": {
"type": "nGram",
"min_gram": 2,
"max_gram": 20,
"token_chars": [
"letter",
"digit",
"punctuation",
"symbol"
]
}
},
"analyzer": {
"nGram_analyzer": {
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "whitespace",
"filter": [
"lowercase",
"asciifolding",
"nGram_filter"
]
},
"whitespace_analyzer": {
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "whitespace",
"filter": [
"lowercase",
"asciifolding"
]
}
}
}
},
"mappings": {
"song": {
"properties": {
"song_field": {
"type": "string",
"analyzer": "nGram_analyzer",
"search_analyzer": "whitespace_analyzer"
},
"suggest": {
"type": "completion",
"analyzer": "simple",
"search_analyzer": "simple",
"payloads": true
}
}
}
}
}
Docs:
POST music/song
{
"song_field" : "beautiful queen",
"suggest" : "beautiful queen"
}
POST music/song
{
"song_field" : "beautiful",
"suggest" : "beautiful"
}
I expect that when user types: "beaatiful q" he will get something like beautiful queen (beaatiful is corrected to beautiful and q is completed to queen).
I've tried the following query:
POST music/song/_search?search_type=dfs_query_then_fetch
{
"size": 10,
"suggest": {
"didYouMean": {
"text": "beaatiful q",
"completion": {
"field": "suggest"
}
}
},
"query": {
"match": {
"song_field": {
"query": "beaatiful q",
"fuzziness": 2
}
}
}
}
Unfortunately, Completion suggester doesn't allow any typos so I get this response:
"suggest": {
"didYouMean": [
{
"text": "beaatiful q",
"offset": 0,
"length": 11,
"options": []
}
]
}
In addition, search gave me these results (beautiful ranked higher although user started to wrote "queen"):
"hits": [
{
"_index": "music",
"_type": "song",
"_id": "AVUj4Y5NancUpEdFLeLo",
"_score": 0.51315063,
"_source": {
"song_field": "beautiful"
"suggest": "beautiful"
}
},
{
"_index": "music",
"_type": "song",
"_id": "AVUj4XFAancUpEdFLeLn",
"_score": 0.32071912,
"_source": {
"song_field": "beautiful queen"
"suggest": "beautiful queen"
}
}
]
UPDATE !!!
I found out that I can use fuzzy query with completion suggester, but now I get no suggestions when querying (fuzzy only supports 2 edit distance):
POST music/song/_search
{
"size": 10,
"suggest": {
"didYouMean": {
"text": "beaatefal q",
"completion": {
"field": "suggest",
"fuzzy" : {
"fuzziness" : 2
}
}
}
}
}
I still expect "beautiful queen" as suggestion response.

Answer 1

When you want to provide 2 or more words as search suggestions, I have found out (the hard way), its not worth it to use ngrams or edgengrams in Elasticsearch.
Using the Shingles token filter and the shingles analyzer will provide you with multi-word phrases and if you couple that with the match_phrase_prefix it should give you the functionality your looking for.
Basically something like this:
PUT /my_index
{
"settings": {
"number_of_shards": 1,
"analysis": {
"filter": {
"my_shingle_filter": {
"type": "shingle",
"min_shingle_size": 2,
"max_shingle_size": 2,
"output_unigrams": false
}
},
"analyzer": {
"my_shingle_analyzer": {
"type": "custom",
"tokenizer": "standard",
"filter": [
"lowercase",
"my_shingle_filter"
]
}
}
}
}
}
And don't forget to do your mapping:
{
"my_type": {
"properties": {
"title": {
"type": "string",
"fields": {
"shingles": {
"type": "string",
"analyzer": "my_shingle_analyzer"
}
}
}
}
}
}
Ngrams and edgengrams are going tokenize single characters, whereas the Shingles analyzer and filters, groups letters (making words) and provide a much more efficient way of producing and searching for phrases. I spent alot of time messing with the 2 above until I saw Shingles mentioned and read up on it. Much better.