I have an application that searches text indexed in a MSSQL database. My current search functionality works fine. I just need to display the search results with the surrounding text of the search terms (like google does). The only tool I could find to do this is Lucene's text highlighting. I read about it from this question: Displaying sample text from the Lucene Search Results. I haven't looked into Lucene for very long, but I'm guessing I'd have to create documents for each search hit.
I was wondering if what I want to do is even possible with Lucene, and whether it'd be overkill to use a tool like this for my purpose. Are there any other tools I could/should use for this?
It depends on the size of the text you are trying to highlight, but if it is rather small, you could use Lucene highlighting functionality on top of your search backend. See Highlighter documentation for more information.
In case this would not be fast enough for you (if you want to highlight large chunks ot text for example), Lucene can make highlighting faster by using term vectors, but this would require you to move your backend from MSSQL to Lucene.
If you already can get surrounding text of the found keywords, and this is really the only thing you need, then yes, Lucene is an overkill - just surround your keywords with highlighting tags. However, in most cases
But in most cases as times goes people start thinking of other advanced options, such as stemming (if you search for "highlight" you also find "highlighting" and "highlighter"), synonym search, language detection, etc. If you ever thought you may need such things, or even you haven't ready algorithm to find text snippets with keywords (surrounding text), I highly recommend you diving into Lucene world. The best option I can think of is to index all your text fields from MSSQL and base all your text search on Lucene.
If you are afraid of hard Lucene coding, you may use Solr - Lucene-based web server with extremely wide range of capabilities, easily configured with XML-files. Solr has both - simple web and a number of programming interfaces (Solrj for Java).
It would be overkill&: Lucene is a complete search/indexing engine with stemming, scoring, and other stuff. It's likely better than what you're doing, but it depends on your goals.
If you're just doing simple keyword highlighting, consider a regex to insert highlighting tags.
Related
I was wondering if you know any algorithm that can do an automatic assignment for the following situation: I have some papers with a some keywords defined, and some reviewers that have some specific keywords defined. How could I do an automatic mapping, so that the reviewer could review the papers from his/her area of interest?
If you are open to using external tools Lucene is a library that will allow you to search text based on (from their website)
phrase queries, wildcard queries, proximity queries, range queries and more
fielded searching (e.g., title, author, contents)
date-range searching
sorting by any field
multiple-index searching with merged results
allows simultaneous update and searching
You will basically need to design your own parser, or specialize an existing parser according to your needs. You need to scan the papers, and according to your keywords,search and match your tokens accordingly. Then the sentences with these keywords are to be separated and displayed to the reviewer.
I would suggest the Stanford NLP POS tagger. Every keyword that you would need, will fall under some part-of-speech. You can then just tag your complete document, and search for those tags and accordingly sort out the sentences.
Apache Lucene could be one solution.
It allows you to index documents either in a RAM directory, or within a real directory of your file system, and then to perform full-text searches.
Its proposes a lot of very interesting features like filters or analyzers. You can for example:
remove the stop words depending on the language of the documents (e.g. for english: a, the, of, etc.);
stem the tokens (e.g. function, functional, functionality, etc., are considered as a single instance);
perform complex queries (e.g. review*, keyw?rds, "to be or not to be", etc.);
and so on and so forth...
You should have a look! Don't hesitate to ask me some code samples if Lucene is the way you chose :)
I'm a Lucene newbie and am thinking of using it to index the words in the title and description elements of RSS feeds so that I can record counts of the most popular words in the feeds.
Various search options are needed, some will have keywords entered manually by users, whereas in other cases popular terms would be generated automatically by the system. So I could have Lucene use query strings to return the counts of hits for manually entered keywords and TermEnums in automated cases?
The system also needs to be able to handle new data from the feeds as they are polled at regular intervals.
Now, I could do much / all of this using hashmaps in Java to work out counts, but if I use Lucene, my question concerns the best way to store the words for counting. To take a single RSS feed, is it wise to have Lucene create a temporary index in memory, and pass the words and hit counts out so other programs can write them to database?
Or is it better to create a Lucene document per feed and add new feed data to it at polling time? So that if a keyword count is required between dates x and y, Lucene can return the values? This implies I can datestamp Lucene entries which I'm not sure of yet.
Hope this makes sense.
Mr Morgan.
From the description you have given in the question, I think Lucene alone will be sufficient. (No need of MySQL or Solr). Lucene API is also easy to use and you won't need to change your frontend code.
From every RSS feed, you can create a Document having three fields; namely title, description and date. The date must preferably be a NumericField. You can then append every document to the lucene index as the feeds arrive.
How frequently do you want the system to automatically generate the popular terms? For eg. Do you want to show the users, "most popular terms last week", etc.? If so, then you can use the NumericRangeFilter to efficiently search the date field you have stored. Once you get the documents satisfying a date range, you can then find the document frequency of each term in the retrieved documents to find the most popular terms. (Do not forget to remove the stopwords from your documents (say by using the StopAnalyzer) or else the most popular terms will be the stopwords)
I can recommend you check out Apache Solr. In a nutshell, Solr is a web enabled front end to Lucene that simplifies integration and also provides value added features. Specifically, the Data Import Handlers make updating/adding new content to your Lucene index really simple.
Further, for the word counting feature you are asking about, Solr has a concept of "faceting" which will exactly fit the problem you're are describing.
If you're already familiar with web applications, I would definitely consider it: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/
Solr is definitely the way to go although I would caution against using it with Apache Tomcat on Windows as the install process is a bloody nightmare. More than happy to guide you through it if you like as I have it working perfectly now.
You might also consider the full text indexing capabilities of MySQL, far easier the Lucene.
Regards
We are going to provide an advanced search option on a system that will let users find events that matches a name (textual search), have on or more tags assigned to it and that will start before or after a given date. Should I consider using hibernate search or something similar? Or should I just generate some jpql queries to get that search feature working.
use hibernate search, that is what it is there for and you will get better performance
trying to construct the queries on the terms you mentioned
name
date
date range
tag
plus support for boolean queries
just to complex
I'd suggest taking a good look at Hibernate Search so you can leverage the power of Lucene.
If you relatively simple requirements for search initially, perhaps implementing it yourself won't be so bad, but as you want to add features and scale up your search, this will require you to write more and more code and make the feature more complicated. Why not reuse a powerful, well-known library that already does all of this (and more)?
I'm looking to compare two documents to determine what percentage of their text matches based on keywords.
To do this I could easily chop them into a set word of sanitised words and compare, but I would like something a bit smarter, something that can match words based on their root, ie. even if their tense or plurality is different. This sort of technique seems to be used in full text searches, but I have no idea what to look for.
Does such an engine (preferably applicable to Java) exist?
Yes, you want a stemmer. Lauri Karttunen did some work with finite state machines that was amazing, but sadly I don't think there's an available implementation to use. As mentioned, Lucene has stemmers for a variety of languages and the OpenNLP and Gate projects might help you as well. Also, how were you planning to "chop them up"? This is a little trickier than most people think because of punctuation, possesives, and the like. And just splitting on white space doesn't work at all in many languages. Take a look at OpenNLP for that too.
Another thing to consider is that just comparing the non stop-words of the two documents might not be the best approach for good similarity depending on what you are actually trying to do because you lose locality information. For example, a common approach to plagiarism detection is to break the documents into chunks of n tokens and compare those. There are algorithms such that you can compare many documents at the same time in this way much more efficiently than doing a pairwise comparison between each document.
I don't know of a pre-built engine, but if you decide to roll your own (e.g., if you can't find pre-written code to do what you want), searching for "Porter Stemmer" should get you started on an algorithm to get rid of (most) suffixes reasonably well.
I think Lucene might be along the lines of what your looking for. From my experience its pretty easy to use.
EDIT: I just reread the question and thought about it some more. Lucene is a full-text search engine for java. However, I'm not quite sure how hard it would be to re purpose it for what your trying to do. either way, it might be a good resource to start looking at and go from there.
I need to index a lot of text. The search results must give me the name of the files containing the query and all of the positions where the query matched in each file - so, I don't have to load the whole file to find the matching portion. What libraries can you recommend for doing this?
update: Lucene has been suggested. Can you give me some info on how should I use Lucene to achieve this? (I have seen examples where the search query returned only the matching files)
For java try Lucene
I believe the lucene term for what you are looking for is highlighting. Here is a very recent report on Lucene highlighting. You will probably need to store word position information in order to get the snippets you are looking for. The Token API may help.
It all depends on how you are going to access it. And of course, how many are going to access it. Read up on MapReduce.
If you are going to roll your own, you will need to create an index file which is sort of a map between unique words and a tuple like (file, line, offset). Of course, you can think of other in-memory data structures like a trie(prefix-tree) a Judy array and the like...
Some 3rd party solutions are listed here.
Have a look at http://www.compass-project.org/ it can be looked on as a wrapper on top of Lucene, Compass simplifies common usage patterns of Lucene such as google-style search, index updates as well as more advanced concepts such as caching and index sharding (sub indexes). Compass also uses built in optimizations for concurrent commits and merges.
The Overview can give you more info
http://www.compass-project.org/overview.html
I have integrated this into a spring project in no time. It is really easy to use and gives what your users will see as google like results.
Lucene - Java
It's open source as well so you are free to use and deploy in your application.
As far as I know, Eclipse IDE help file is powered by Lucene - It is tested by millions
Also take a look at Lemur Toolkit.
Why don't you try and construct a state machine by reading all files ? Transitions between states will be letters, and states will be either final (some files contain the considered word, in which case the list is available there) or intermediate.
As far as multiple-word lookups, you'll have to deal with them independently before intersecting the results.
I believe the Boost::Statechart library may be of some help for that matter.
I'm aware you asked for a library, just wanted to point you to the underlying concept of building an inverted index (from Introduction to Information Retrieval by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze).