ApacheCon NA 2013

Portland, Oregon

February 26th – 28th, 2013

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Thursday 11:45 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

Synonyms and Relevancy Strategies

Leo Oliveira

Track:
Big Data
Audience level:
Intermediate

Description

How to use the Synonym filter to build advanced semantic transformations in your search to add more capabilities for your user. Learn how to use synonyms with Dismax or EDismax generating a semantic relevancy while boosting the right documents in your search to make it work better.

Abstract

Solr adds Synonym capabilities from the scratch and it is one of its most widely used filters. This talk will develop further on what is a good strategy for synonyms and how to deploy it correctly in a relevancy scheme so that you don't end up bringing irrelevant results up front in page 1, which could be achieved with Solr in very different versions of the software, included the most recent one, 4.0.

The outline of the presentation will be:

  • Introduction
  • Lucene indexing process
  • The Importance of Relevancy
  • The Importance of Having Results in your search for your Users.
  • Synonym Theory Vs. Synonyms in Search
  • 1-way transformations
  • Index-time synonyms
  • The problem of phrase synonyms
  • Query-time transformations
  • Boosting with synonyms using dismax or edismax
  • Synonyms in UI
  • Semantic Relevancy
  • Real-world examples
  • Conclusion