Applying boosts inside a SpanQuery - solr

Is there a way to apply a boost inside a SpanOrQuery? (Solr 7.1, lucene of same version.)
Example of query structure generated by edismax query parser (inside the usual +BooleanQuery / DisjunctionMaxQuery for multiple fields):
SpanNearQuery
List of SpanOrQuery
List of SpanTermQuery or SpanNearQuery <-- I want to boost those terms
I want to apply a boost to each clause inside the SpanOrQuery. So I tried (via custom query parser extending edismax):
SpanNearQuery
List of SpanOrQuery
List of SpanBoostQuery, each wrapping:
a SpanTermQuery or a SpanNearQuery.
The boost seems to be ignored, although the query is executed successfully (except boost not applied).
Here is the use case:
The input is a sentence, a phrase query (quoted with slop) to valuate proximity. I am using edismax query parser and a SynonymGraphFilter and I want to apply a different boost for each synonym, so the boost information is attached to each term in the synonym file (e.g. 0.7_foo). In case of multi-term synonyms (expanded version), edismax generates a SpanQuery, which sounds to me like a graph search, so far so good.
Where it fails is when I insert a SpanBoostQuery to wrap each clause inside the SpanOrQuery (via a custom query parser extending edismax, extracting boosts from term text). While the query is still returning results, the boost seems just ignored.
Is that a misusage? A bug? Any advice about how I can fix it or work around it please?
To have a similar behavior, I replaced the SpanQuery by a list of PhraseQueries, one for each possible combination of terms in the SpanQuery, which can result in lots of phrases, the performances seem highly affected and we lose lots of information.
Thanks a lot!
Edit:
The tree above describes the query generated by my custom query parser (I checked the resulting Query by debugging it), but for whoever wants to figure out how this is implemented, I first let edismax return a parsed query, then I go through the tree recursively, rebuilding a new Query, until I reach the leaf (SpanTermQuery), and I apply a code like below to wrap the term in a boost (SpanBoostQuery is provided by lucene).
if (initialQuery instanceof SpanTermQuery) {
SpanTermQuery q = (SpanTermQuery) initialQuery;
// parse and extract term/boost from q.getTerm(),
// e.g. "0.7_foo" -> {term: foo, boost: 0.7}
q = new SpanTermQuery(term);
if (boost >= 0 && boost != 1) {
return new SpanBoostQuery(q, boost);
} else {
return q;
}
}
I am aware it is not an optimal solution, but so far it works except the missing boost. Advices are welcome, but it would be a separate topic, and not as important for me as my question above :)

Related

Solr negative boost

I'm looking into the possibility of de-boosting a set of documents during
query time. In my application, when I search for e.g. "preferences", I want
to de-boost content tagged with ContentGroup:"Developer" or in other words,
push those content back in the order. Here's the catch. I've the following
weights on query fields and boost query on source
qf=text^6 title^15 IndexTerm^8
As you can see, title has a higher weight.
Now, a bunch of content tagged with ContentGroup:"Developer" consists of a
title like "Preferences.material" or "Preferences Property" or
"Preferences.graphics". The boost on title pushes these documents at the
top.
What I'm looking is to see if there's a way to deboost all documents that are
tagged with ContentGroup:"Developer" irrespective of the term occurrence is
text or title. I tried something like, but didn't make any difference.
Source:simplecontent^10 Source:Help^20 (-ContentGroup-local:("Developer"))^99
I'm using edismax query parser.
Any pointers will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Shamik
You're onto something with your last attempt, but you have to start with *:*, so that you actually have something to subtract the documents from. The resulting set of documents (those not matching your query) can then be boosted.
From the Solr Relevancy FAQ
How do I give a negative (or very low) boost to documents that match a query?
True negative boosts are not supported, but you can use a very "low" numeric boost value on query clauses. In general the problem that confuses people is that a "low" boost is still a boost, it can only improve the score of documents that match. For example, if you want to find all docs matching "foo" or "bar" but penalize the scores of documents matching "xxx" you might be tempted to try...
q = foo^100 bar^100 xxx^0.00001 # NOT WHAT YOU WANT
...but this will still help a document matching all three clauses score higher then a document matching only the first two. One way to fake a "negative boost" is to give a large boost to everything that does not match. For example...
q = foo^100 bar^100 (*:* -xxx)^999
NOTE: When using (e)dismax, people sometimes expect that specifying a pure negative query with a large boost in the "bq" param will work (since Solr automatically makes top level purely negative positive queries by adding an implicit ":" -- but this doesn't work with "bq", because of how queries specified via "bq" are added directly to the main query. You need to be explicit...
?defType=dismax&q=foo bar&bq=(*:* -xxx)^999

How to perform an exact search in Solr

I implementing Solr search using an API. When I call it using the parameters as, "Chillout Lounge", it returns me the collection which are same/similar to the string "Chillout Lounge".
But when I search for "Chillout Lounge Box", it returns me results which don't have any of these three words.(in the DB there are values which have these 3 values, but they are not returned.)
According to me, Solr uses Fuzzy search, but when it is done it should return me some values, which will have at least one these value.
Or what could be the possible changes I should to my schema.XML, such that is would give me proper values.
First of all - "Fuzzy search" is a feature you'll have to ask for (by using ~ in standard Lucene query syntax).
If you're talking about regular searches, you can use q.op to select which operator to use. q.op=AND will make sure that all the terms match, while q.op=OR will make any document that contain at least one of the terms be returned. As long as you aren't using fq for this, the documents that match more terms should be scored higher (as the score will add up across multiple terms), and thus, be shown higher in the result set.
You can use the debug query feature in the web interface to see scores for each term for a document, and find out why the document was returned at all. If the document doesn't match any terms, it shouldn't be returned, unless you're asking for all documents to be returned.
Be aware that the analyzer chain defined for the field you're searching might affect what's considered a match and not.
You'll have to add a proper example to get a more detailed answer.

Solr highlighting gives field/snippets with ANY term, instead of those that satisfy the query fully

I'm using Solr 5.x, standard highlighter, and i'm getting snippets which matches even one of the search terms only, even if i indicate q.op=AND.
I need ONLY the fields and snippets that matches ALL the terms (unless i say q.op=OR or just omit it), i.e. the field/snippet must satisfy the query. Solr does return the field/snippet that has all the terms, but also return many others.
I'm using hl.fl=*, to get the only fields having the terms, and searching against the default field ('text' containing full doc). Need to use * since i have multiple dynamic fields. Most fields are 'text_general' type (for search and HL), and some are 'string' type for faceting.
If its not possible for snippets to have all the terms, i MUST get only the fields that satisfy the query fully (since the question is more talking about matching all the terms, but the search query can become arbitrarily complex, so the fields/snippets should match the query).
Also, next is to get snippets highlighted with proximity based search/terms. What should i do/use for this? The fields coming in highlighting in this scenario should also satisfy the proximity query (unlike i get a field that contain any term, without regard to proximity constrains and other query terms etc)
Thanks for your help.
I've also encountered the same problem with highlighting. In my case, the query like
(foo AND bar) OR eggs
highlighted eggs and foo despite bar was not present in the document. I didn't manage to come up with proper solution, however I devised a dirty workaround.
I use the following query:
id:highlighted_document_id AND text:(my_original_query)
with debugQuery set to true. Then I parse explain text for highlighted_document_id. The text contains the terms from the query, which have contributed to the score. The terms, which should not be highlighted, are not present in the explanation.
The Python regex expressions I use to extract the terms (valid for Solr 5.2.1):
term_regex = re.compile(r'weight\(text:(.+) in')
wildcard_term_regex = re.compile(r'text:(.+), product')
then I simply search the markings in the highlighted text and remove them if the term doesn't match against any of the term in term_regex and wildcard_term_regex.
The solution is probably pretty limited, but works for me.

In Solr, how can we use terms external to the search query to bias result ordering?

We're working on a plan to identify content tags our users are interested in. So, for instance, we may determine that User X consumes content tagged with "kermit" and "piggy" more often than other tags. These are their "favored tags."
When the users search, we'd like to favor/bias documents that contain these terms.
This means we can't boost the documents at index time, because every user will have different favored tags. Additionally, they may not be searching for the favored tags themselves. They may search for "gonzo," and so we absolutely want to give them documents with "gonzo," but we want to boost documents that also contain "kermit" or "piggy."
These favored tags are not used to actually query the index, but rather are used to bias the result ordering. The favored tags become something of a tie-breaker -- all else being equal, documents containing these terms will rank higher.
This is new/planned development, so we can use whatever version and parser stack is optimal to solve this problem.
Solution in SolrNet
The question was correctly answered below, but here's the code for SolrNet just in case someone else is using it.
var localParams = new LocalParams();
localParams.Add("bq", "kermit^10000); //numeric value is the degree of boost
var solr = ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<ISolrOperations<MySolrDocumentClass>>();
solr.Query(new SolrQuery("whatever") + localParams);
You didn't specify which query parser you're using, but if you are using the Dismax or Extended Dismax query parser, the bq argument should do exactly what you're looking for. bq adds search criteria to a search solely for the purpose of affecting the relevancy, but not to limit the result set.
From the Dismax documentation:
The bq (Boost Query) Parameter
The bq parameter specifies an additional, optional, query clause that
will be added to the user's main query to influence the score. For
example, if you wanted to add a relevancy boost for recent documents:
q=cheese
bq=date:[NOW/DAY-1YEAR TO NOW/DAY]
You can specify multiple bq parameters. If you want your query to be
parsed as separate clauses with separate boosts, use multiple bq
parameters.
In this case, you may want to add &bq=kermit&bq=piggy to the end of your Solr query. If you aren't using one of these query parsers, this need may be exactly the motivation you need to switch.

Adding date boosting to complex SOLR queries

I currently have a SOLR query which uses the query (q), query fields (qf) and phrase fields (pf) to retrieve the results I want. An example is:
/solr/select
?q=superbowl
&qf=title^3+headline^2+intro+fulltext
&pf=title^3+headline^2+intro+fulltext
&fl=id,title,ts_modified,score
&debugQuery=true
The idea is that the title and headline of the "main item" give the best indication of what the result is "about", but the intro and fulltext provides some input too. Ie, imagine a collection of links, where the collection itself has metadata (what it's a collection of), but each link has it's own data (title of the link, synopsis, etc). If we search for "superbowl", the most relevant results are the ones with "superbowl" in the collection metadata, the least relevant results are those with "superbowl" in just the synopsis of one of the links... but they're all valid results.
What I'm trying to do is add a boost to the relevancy score so that the most recent results float towards the top, but retaining title,headline,intro,fulltext as part of the formula. A recent result with the search string in the collection metadata would be more relevant than one with it only in the links metadata... but that "links only" recent result might be more relevant than a very old result with the search string in the collection metadata. (I hope that's somewhat clear).
The problem is that I can't figure out how to combine the boost function documented on the SOLR site with the use of the qf/pf fields. Specifically...
From the SOLR site, something like the following works to boost the results by date:
/solr/select
?q={!boost%20b=$dateboost%20v=$qq}
&dateboost=ord(ts_modified)
&qq=superbowl
&fl=ts_modified,score
&debugQuery=true
However, I can't figure out how to combine that query with the use of qf and pf. Any suggestions would be more than welcome.
Thanks to danben's response, I was able to come up with the following:
/solr/select
?q={!boost%20b=$dateboost%20v=$qq%20defType=dismax}
&dateboost=ord(ts_modified)
&qq=superbowl
&qf=title^3+headline^2+intro^2+fulltext
&pf=title^3+headline^2+intro^2+fulltext
&fl=ts_modifieds,score
&debugQuery=true
It looks like the actual problems I was having were:
I left spaces in the q param instead of escaping them (%20) when copy/pasting
I didn't include the defType=dismax in my q param, so that it would pay attention to the qf/pf parameters
Check out http://wiki.apache.org/solr/SolrRelevancyFAQ#How_can_I_boost_the_score_of_newer_documents
This is based on the ms function, which returns the difference in milliseconds between two timestamps / dates, and ReciprocalFloatFunction which increases as the value passed decreases.
Since you are using the DisMaxRequestHandler, you may need to specify your query using the bq/bf parameters. From http://lucene.apache.org/solr/api/org/apache/solr/handler/DisMaxRequestHandler.html:
bq - (Boost Query) a raw lucene query that will be included in the
users query to influence the score. If
this is a BooleanQuery with a default
boost (1.0f), then the individual
clauses will be added directly to the
main query. Otherwise, the query will
be included as is. This param can be
specified multiple times, and the
boosts are are additive. NOTE: the
behaviour listed above is only in
effect if a single bq paramter is
specified. Hence you can disable it by
specifying an additional, blank, bq
parameter.
bf - (Boost Functions) functions (with optional boosts) that will be
included in the users query to
influence the score. Format is:
"funcA(arg1,arg2)^1.2
funcB(arg3,arg4)^2.2". NOTE:
Whitespace is not allowed in the
function arguments. This param can be
specified multiple times, and the
functions are additive.
Here is a nice article about Date-boosting Solr search results:
http://www.metaltoad.com/blog/date-boosting-solr-drupal-search-results
In Drupal this can be simply achieved by the following code:
using Apachesolr module
/**
* Implements hook_apachesolr_query_alter().
*/
function hook_search_apachesolr_query_alter(DrupalSolrQueryInterface $query) {
$query->addParam('bf', array('freshness' =>
'recip(abs(ms(NOW/HOUR,dm_field_date)),3.16e-11,1,.1)'
));
}

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