How to match parts of a word in elasticsearch? - elasticsearch

Question

How can I match parts of a word to the parent word ?. For example: I need to match "eese" or "heese" to the word "cheese".

Answer 1

The best way to achieve this is using an edgeNGram token filter combined with two reverse token filters. So, first you need to define a custom analyzer called reverse_analyzer in your index settings like below. Then you can see that I've declared a string field called your_field with a sub-field called suffix which has our custom analyzer defined.
PUT your_index
{
"settings": {
"analysis": {
"analyzer": {
"reverse_analyzer": {
"tokenizer": "keyword",
"filter" : ["lowercase", "reverse", "substring", "reverse"]
}
},
"filter": {
"substring": {
"type": "edgeNGram",
"min_gram": 1,
"max_gram": 10
}
}
}
},
"mappings": {
"your_type": {
"properties": {
"your_field": {
"type": "string",
"fields": {
"suffix": {
"type": "string",
"analyzer": "reverse_analyzer"
}
}
}
}
}
}
}
Then you can index a test document with "cheese" inside, like this:
PUT your_index/your_type/1
{"your_field": "cheese"}
When this document is indexed, the your_field.suffix field will contain the following tokens:
e
se
ese
eese
heese
cheese
Under the hood what is happening when indexing cheese is the following:
The keyword tokenizer will tokenize a single token, => cheese
The lowercase token filter will put the token in lowercase => cheese
The reverse token filter will reverse the token => eseehc
The substring token filter will produce different tokens of length 1 to 10 => e, es, ese, esee, eseeh, eseehc
Finally, the second reverse token filter will reverse again all tokens => e, se, ese, eese, heese, cheese
Those are all the tokens that will be indexed
So we can finally search for eese (or any suffix of cheese) in that sub-field and find our match
POST your_index/_search
{
"query": {
"match": {
"your_field.suffix": "eese"
}
}
}
=> Yields the document we've just indexed above.

Answer 2

You can do it two ways:
If you need it happen only for some search then search box only you can pass
*eese* or *heese*
Just give * in beginning and end of your search word. If you need it for every search
string "*#{params[:query]}*"
this will match with your parent word and give the result

Answer 3

There are multiple ways to do this
The analyzer approach - Here you Ngram tokenizer to break sub tokens of all the words. Hence for the word "cheese" -> [ "chee" , "hees" , "eese" , "cheese" ] and all ind of substrings would be generated. With this index size will go high , but the search speed would be optimized
The wildcard query approach - In this approach , a scan happens on the reverse index. This does not occupy additional index size , but it will take more time on the search.