[[hunspell]] === Hunspell Stemmer
Elasticsearch provides ((("dictionary stemmers", "Hunspell stemmer")))((("stemming words", "dictionary stemmers", "Hunspell stemmer")))dictionary-based stemming via the http://bit.ly/1KNFdXI[`hunspell` token filter]. Hunspell http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/[_hunspell.sourceforge.net_] is the spell checker used by Open Office, LibreOffice, Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, and many other open and closed source projects.
Hunspell dictionaries((("Hunspell stemmer", "obtaining a Hunspell dictionary"))) can be obtained from the following:
- http://extensions.openoffice.org/[_extensions.openoffice.org_]: Download and
unzip the
.oxt
extension file. - http://mzl.la/157UORf[_addons.mozilla.org_]:
Download and unzip the
.xpi
addon file. - http://bit.ly/1ygnODR[OpenOffice archive]: Download and unzip the
.zip
file.
A Hunspell dictionary consists of two files with the same base name--such as
en_US
—but with one of two extensions:
.dic
::
Contains all the root words, in alphabetical order, plus a code representing
all possible suffixes and prefixes (which collectively are known as _affixes_)
.aff
::
Contains the actual prefix or suffix transformation for each code listed
in the `.dic` file
==== Installing a Dictionary
The Hunspell token ((("Hunspell stemmer", "installing a dictionary")))filter looks for dictionaries within a dedicated Hunspell
directory, which defaults to ./config/hunspell/
. The .dic
and .aff
files should be placed in a subdirectory whose name represents the language
or locale of the dictionaries. For instance, we could create a Hunspell
stemmer for American English with the following layout:
[source,text]
config/ └ hunspell/ <1> └ en_US/ <2> ├ en_US.dic ├ en_US.aff2>1>
└ settings.yml <3>
<1> The location of the Hunspell directory can be changed by setting
indices.analysis.hunspell.dictionary.location
in the
config/elasticsearch.yml
file.1>
<2> en_US
will be the name of the locale or language
that we pass to the
hunspell
token filter.2>
<3> Per-language settings file, described in the following section.3>
==== Per-Language Settings
The settings.yml
file contains settings((("Hunspell stemmer", "per-language settings"))) that apply to all of the
dictionaries within the language directory, such as these:
[source,yaml]
ignore_case: true strict_affix_parsing: true
The meaning of these settings is as follows:
ignore_case
::
+
Hunspell dictionaries are case sensitive by default: the surname Booker
is a
different word from the noun booker
, and so should be stemmed differently. It
may seem like a good idea to use the hunspell
stemmer in case-sensitive
mode,((("Hunspell stemmer", "using in case insensitive mode"))) but that can complicate things:
- A word at the beginning of a sentence will be capitalized, and thus appear to be a proper noun.
- The input text may be all uppercase, in which case almost no words will be found.
- The user may search for names in all lowercase, in which case no capitalized words will be found.
As a general rule, it is a good idea to set ignore_case
to true
.
--
strict_affix_parsing
::
The quality of dictionaries varies greatly.((("Hunspell stemmer", "strict_affix_parsing"))) Some dictionaries that are
available online have malformed rules in the .aff
file. By default, Lucene
will throw an exception if it can't parse an affix rule. If you need to deal
with a broken affix file, you can set strict_affix_parsing
to false
to tell
Lucene to ignore the broken rules.((("strict_affix_parsing")))
.Custom Dictionaries
If multiple dictionaries (.dic
files) are placed in the same
directory, ((("Hunspell stemmer", "custom dictionaries")))they will be merged together at load time. This allows you to
tailor the downloaded dictionaries with your own custom word lists:
[source,text]
config/ └ hunspell/ └ en_US/ <1> ├ en_US.dic ├ en_US.aff <2> ├ custom.dic2>1>
└ settings.yml
<1> The custom
and en_US
dictionaries will be merged.1>
<2> Multiple .aff
files are not allowed, as they could use
conflicting rules.2>
The format of the .dic
and .aff
files is discussed in
<
==== Creating a Hunspell Token Filter
Once your dictionaries are installed on all nodes, you can define a hunspell
token filter((("Hunspell stemmer", "creating a hunspell token filter"))) that uses them:
[source,json]
PUT /my_index { "settings": { "analysis": { "filter": { "en_US": { "type": "hunspell", "language": "en_US" <1> } }, "analyzer": { "en_US": { "tokenizer": "standard", "filter": [ "lowercase", "en_US" ] } } } }1>
}
<1> The language
has the same name as the directory where
the dictionary lives.1>
You can test the new analyzer with the analyze
API,
and compare its output to that of the english
analyzer:
[source,json]
GET /my_index/_analyze?analyzer=en_US <1> reorganizes1>
GET /_analyze?analyzer=english <2>2>
reorganizes
<1> Returns organize
1>
<2> Returns reorgan
2>
An interesting property of the hunspell
stemmer, as can be seen in the
preceding example, is that it can remove prefixes as well as as suffixes. Most
algorithmic stemmers remove suffixes only.
[TIP]
Hunspell dictionaries can consume a few megabytes of RAM. Fortunately, Elasticsearch creates only a single instance of a dictionary per node. All shards that use the same Hunspell analyzer share the same instance.
==================================================
[[hunspell-dictionary-format]] ==== Hunspell Dictionary Format
While it is not necessary to understand the((("Hunspell stemmer", "Hunspell dictionary format"))) format of a Hunspell dictionary in
order to use the hunspell
tokenizer, understanding the format will help you
write your own custom dictionaries. It is quite simple.
For instance, in the US English dictionary, the en_US.dic
file contains an entry for
the word analyze
, which looks like this:
[source,text]
analyze/ADSG
The en_US.aff
file contains the prefix or suffix rules for the A
, G
,
D
, and S
flags. Each flag consists of a number of rules, only one of
which should match. Each rule has the following format:
[source,text]
[type] [flag] [letters to remove] [letters to add] [condition]
For instance, the following is suffix (SFX
) rule D
. It says that, when a
word ends in a consonant (anything but a
, e
, i
, o
, or u
) followed by
a y
, it can have the y
removed and ied
added (for example, ready
->
readied
).
[source,text]
SFX D y ied aeiouy
The rules for the A
, G
, D
, and S
flags mentioned previously are as follows:
[source,text]
SFX D Y 4 SFX D 0 d e <1> SFX D y ied aeiouy SFX D 0 ed ey SFX D 0 ed [aeiou]y1>
SFX S Y 4 SFX S y ies aeiouy SFX S 0 s [aeiou]y SFX S 0 es [sxzh] SFX S 0 s sxzhy <2>2>
SFX G Y 2 SFX G e ing e <3> SFX G 0 ing e3>
PFX A Y 1
PFX A 0 re . <4>4>
<1> analyze
ends in an e
, so it can become analyzed
by adding a d
.1>
<2> analyze
does not end in s
, x
, z
, h
, or y
, so it can become
analyzes
by adding an s
.2>
<3> analyze
ends in an e
, so it can become analyzing
by removing the e
and adding ing
.3>
<4> The prefix re
can be added to form reanalyze
. This rule can be
combined with the suffix rules to form reanalyzes
, reanalyzed
,
reanalyzing
.4>
More information about the Hunspell syntax can be found on the http://bit.ly/1ynGhv6[Hunspell documentation site].