Topic on Help talk:CirrusSearch

Hi,

Any profile example on how we can use a synonym file with CirrusSearch and Elastic ?

Thanks

Unfortunately synonyms aren't something CirrusSearch has any support for. It's been in the background as something to work on, but we need to come up with a solution that works in hundreds of languages and likely defers the actualy synonym definition to wiki editors rather than system administrators.

While not exactly synonyms, on the WMF wikis we rely on redirects to pages to provide alternate names for them. In most cases where wiki search externally appears to have used synonyms what actually happened was there was a redirect to the page giving alternate titles (that are used as a fairly strong ranking signal).

Thanks for the feedback.

Because Elasticsearch doses support synonyms as a filter and that Cirrus is really just a Bridge to Elastic, I was hopping we could work this out with profiles, such as

'default' => [
'builder_class' => Query\FullTextQueryStringQueryBuilder::class,
'settings' => [
    'filter' => [
	'type' => 'synonym',
	'settings' => [
		'synonyms_path' => 'my_synonyms.txt',
                'updateable' => 'true'
	]
      ]
],

Synonyms are important to us (medical wiki), as for instance if you look for, say "audition", you should find not only page with "audition" in it, but also page with "hear" or "malleus" (small bone inside the hear).

Editing the page to add synonyms is not an option for us, as this will add a lot of work for page producers.