Maybe a custom search component would be in order, to “enrich” the incoming query. Again, preprocessing the query for synonym expansion before Solr parses it. It could call the external synonym API and cache synonyms as well.
But, I’d still lean towards preprocessing in an application layer. Although, for hundreds or thousands of synonyms it would probably hit the 2048 common limit for URLs in some containers, which would need to be raised. -- Jack Krupansky From: Shai Erera Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2013 8:54 AM To: dev@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Programmatic Synonyms Filter (Lucene and/or Solr) The examples I've seen so far are single words. But I learned today something new .. the number of "synonyms" returned for a word may be in the range of hundreds, sometimes even thousands. So I'm not sure query-time synonyms may work at all .. what do you think? Shai On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 3:21 PM, Jack Krupansky <j...@basetechnology.com> wrote: Your best bet is to preprocess queries and expand synonyms in your own application layer. The Lucene/Solr synonym implementation, design, and architecture is fairly lightweight (although FST is a big improvement) and not architected for large and dynamic synonym sets. Do you need multi-word phrase synonyms as well, or is this strictly single-word synonyms? -- Jack Krupansky From: Shai Erera Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2013 1:36 AM To: dev@lucene.apache.org Subject: Programmatic Synonyms Filter (Lucene and/or Solr) Hi I was asked to integrate with a system which provides synonyms for words through API. I checked the existing synonym filters in Lucene and Solr and they all seem to take a synonyms map up front. E.g. Lucene's SynonymFilter takes a SynonymMap which exposes an FST, so it's not really programmatic in the sense that I can provide an impl which will pull the synonyms through the other system's API. Solr SynonymFilterFactory just loads the synonyms from a file into a SynonymMap, and then uses Lucene's SynonymFilter, so it doesn't look like I can extend that one either. The problem is that the synonyms DB I should integrate with is HUGE and will probably not fit in RAM (SynonymMap). Nor is it currently possible to pull all available synonyms from it in one go. The API I have is something like String[] getSynonyms(String word). So I have few questions: 1) Did I miss a Filter which does take a programmatic syn-map which I can provide my own impl to? 2) If not, Would it make sense to modify SynonymMap to offer getSynonyms(word) API (using BytesRef / CharsRef of course), with an FSTSynonymMap default impl so that users can provide their own impl, e.g. not requiring everything to be in RAM? 2.1) Side-effect benefit, I think, is that we won't require everyone to deal with the FST API that way, though I'll admit I cannot think of may use cases for not using SynonymFilter as-is ... 3) If the answer to (1) and (2) is NO, I guess my only option is to implement my own SynonymFilter, copying most of the code from Lucene's ... right? Shai
