internetarchive/fatcat-scholar

Ability to override stemming in queries

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#9 opened on Oct 5, 2020

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enhancementhelp wanted

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Description

It would be good to be able to override stemming at query time. Stemming by default probably makes the most sense, even for phrase queries, but in some cases we would want to return only exact matches.

For example, "dancing" matches "dance". We could have an alternative field or flag so it only matches "dancing".

In terms of implementation, this could definitely be done by including an extra non-stemmed copy of all fields. For example: everything.exact:"dancing".

Related: case-sensitivity, projecting down diacritics (et al), and off-by-N fuzzy typo tolerance.

A blog post noting this issue: https://jurnsearch.wordpress.com/2020/09/28/internet-archive-scholar-is-live/

Contributor guide

Research direction
Investigate how stemming is currently applied in the search index and query pipeline. Look at the existing field mappings and query parsing. Propose adding a non stemmed field (e.g., `everything.exact`) that stores original tokens and can be queried with a flag or special syntax. Consider trade offs with index size and performance.
Tech stack
python
Domain
backendsearchapi
Issue type
Feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
3
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
Half day
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Mostly clear
Prerequisites
Pythonsearch indexing basics
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
30