Solr negative boost - solr

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

Related

Solr Query Syntax conversion from boolean expression

I'm attempting to query solr for documents, given a basic schema with the following field names, data types irrelevant:
I'm attempting to match documents that match at least one of the following:
occupation, name, age, gender but i want to OR them together
How do you OR together many terms, and enforce the document to match at least one?
This seems to be failing: +(name:Sarah age:24 occupation:doctor gender:male)
How do you convert a boolean expression into solr query syntax? I can't figure out the syntax with + and - and the default operator for OR.
Still I don't get your requirement but you just need to query like:
+(age:24 OR gender:male)
Or if you want data for multiple value in same field with OR condition like.
i.e. You get data of age:24 and age:25 both.
+(age:24 OR age:25 OR gender:male)
Then you can:
+(age:(24 25) OR gender:male)
If it is't your requirement, then let me know.
If you want to make it as simple as possible for the client, just go for the dismax[1] or edismax[2] query parser.
Specifically you can configure a request parameter called "qf" :
"The qf parameter introduces a list of fields, each of which is assigned a boost factor to increase or decrease that particular field’s importance in the query. For example, the query below:
qf=fieldOne^2.3 fieldTwo fieldThree^0.4
assigns fieldOne a boost of 2.3, leaves fieldTwo with the default boost (because no boost factor is specified), and fieldThree a boost of 0.4.
These boost factors make matches in fieldOne much more significant than matches in fieldTwo, which in turn are much more significant than matches in fieldThree." from the wiki
Then you can just pass a free text query, and it will be searched in the fields you specified, giving also different importance to each one, if necessary.
[1] https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/6_6/the-dismax-query-parser.html
[2] https://lucene.apache.org/solr/guide/6_6/the-extended-dismax-query-parser.html

SOLR Down boosting on field Value

I have got this query in solr. The problem is, i am getting search results that contains a category of items named "PRD DELETED".
Now all the items that have "PRD DELETED", i want to display those at the end.
For Ex if 100 records are there and one page contains 25 records, then on the last page "PRD DELETED" records should display.
Pls note that "PRD DELETED" is a value and not any category. I think down boosting is needed here, but i am unable to find the exact solution.
Any suggestion here would be a big help.
The solution is usually to do the opposite: boost all documents that isn't deleted, instead of trying to negatively boost those that is. Boosts are either multiplicative or additive, and while multiplicative boosts can reduce the score value, the additive can't. bq and qf are additive, while boost is multiplicative.
The Relevancy FAQ has an example for this case:
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
Implementing it as a multiplicative boost would probably involve using if and then returning either 1 or a lower value depending on whether the field has the given value.

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.

Haystack/Solr boosting results if the query is found in a specific field

We're having issues with non relevant results being returned as the highest results in our search and we're trying to improve that behavior, but not really sure how.
We have SearchIndex with about a dozen fields. The document=True field is a template backed field that we have placed the majority of the content into. Some of the stuff found in there is much less relevant than other stuff, even if it's still useful.
To give a concrete example: if a user searches for "red rose", we want to return red roses as the top results...even better if lower results are just roses or just red, or even are described as being "rose red" in color.
The issue is our document=True field has a ton of items that are described as being "rose red". Worse the actual red roses don't have "red" and "rose" particularly close to each other as those values would come from disparate fields. As a result we get the top few hundred results that are completely irrelevant.
What we would like to do is either:
A. Search the primary document and then search each of our other fields and boost (but not hard filter) accordingly. If the term "rose" appears in one of the items names and "red" appears as one of it's attribute values than that result should have a higher score. This gives us the optimal results in theory sorted by relevancy.
B. Search all fields at once and boost if the value is any of the "boosted" fields.
It seems like using field boost should be the answer, but we can't figure out how to express it since filtering based on a field is a harsh exclude and we want it to only impact the relevance scoring.
The result of both of these is effectively the same. We just can't figure out how to do either of them with Haystack. Or if we'd have to fall back to raw queries how to write a solr query that accomplishes this.
I can give you some pointers, as I did not get the exact use case :-
You can check on Solr edismax query parser to configure:-
Fields you want to search on - Mainly to select the results
Variable boost on fields for relevancy - To determine the importance on fields
Variable boost for different words combination e.g. single words, phrase match, shingle match with slop to determine relevancy
Provide additional boost on other fields
This will help you to filter the results and order them accordingly as per the field and word combination matches

Can SOLR/Lucene report calculated score of extra named documents, even if they're not in top N results?

I'd like to submit a query to SOLR/Lucene, plus a list of document IDs. From the query, I'd like the usual top-N scored results, but I'd also like to get the scores for the named documents... no matter how low they are.
Can anyone think of an easy/supported way to do this in a single index scan, where the scores for the 'added' (non-ranking/pinned-for-inclusion) docs are comparable/same-scaled as those for the top-N results? (Patching SOLR with specialized classes would be OK; I figure that's what I may have to do if there's no existing support.)
Or failing that, could it be simulated with a followup query, ideally in a way that the named-document scores could be scaled to be roughly comparable to the top-N for the reference query?
Alternatively -- and perhaps as good or better for my intended use -- could I make a single request against a SOLR/Lucene index which includes M (with M=2 or more) distinct queries, and return the results that are in the top-N for any of the M queries, and for every result include its score against all M of the distinct queries?
(Even in my above formulation, the list of documents that I want scored along with a new query will typically have been the results from a prior query.)
Solutions or even just fragments of possible approaches appreciated!
I am not sure if I understand properly what you want to achieve but wouldn't a simple
q: (somequery) OR id: (1 OR 2 OR 4)
be enough?
If you would want both parts to be boosted by the same scale (I am not sure if this isn't the default behaviour of Solr) you would want to use dismax or edismax and your query would change to something like:
q: (somequery)^10 OR id: (1 OR 2 OR 4)^10
You would then have both the elements defined by the IDs and the query results scored the same way.
To self-answer, reporting what I've found since posting...
One clumsy option is the explainOther parameter, which takes another query. (This query could be a OR list of interesting document IDs.) The response will then include a full scoring explanation for documents which match this other query. explainOther only has effect when combined with the also-required debugQuery parameter.
All that debug/explain information is overkill for the need, but may be useful, or the code paths that implement it might provide a guide to making a hypothetical new more narrowly-focused 'scoreOther' option.
Another option would be to make use of pseudo-field calculated using the query() function to report how any set of results score on some other query/queries. So if for example the original document set was the top-N from query_A, and then those are the exact documents that you also want to score against query_B, you would execute query_A again with a reporting-field …&fl=bscore:query({!dismax v="query_B"})&…. Then the document's scores against query_B would be included in the output (as bscore).
Finally, the result-grouping functionality can be used both collect the top-N for one query and scores for lesser documents intersecting with other queries in one go. For example, if querying for query_B and adding …&group=true&group.query=query_B&group.query=query_A&…, you'll get back groups that satisfy query_B (ranked by query_B), and that satisfy both query_B and query_A (but again ranked by query_B). This could be mixed with the functional field above to get the scores by another query (like query_A) as well.
However, all groups will share the same sort order (from either the master query or something specified by a group.sort parameter), so it's not currently possible (SOLR-4.0.0-beta) to get several top-N results according to different scorings, just the top-Ns according to one scoring, limited by certain groups. (There's a comment in the source code suggesting alternate sorts per group may be envisioned as a future capability.)

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