solr suggester not returning any results - solr

Question

I've followed the solr wiki article for suggester almost to the T here: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/Suggester. I have the following xml in my solrconfig.xml:
<searchComponent class="solr.SpellCheckComponent" name="suggest">
<lst name="spellchecker">
<str name="name">suggest</str>
<str name="classname">org.apache.solr.spelling.suggest.Suggester</str>
<str name="lookupImpl">org.apache.solr.spelling.suggest.tst.TSTLookup</str>
<str name="field">description</str>
<float name="threshold">0.05</float>
<str name="buildOnCommit">true</str>
</lst>
</searchComponent>
<requestHandler class="org.apache.solr.handler.component.SearchHandler" name="/suggest">
<lst name="defaults">
<str name="spellcheck">true</str>
<str name="spellcheck.dictionary">suggest</str>
<str name="spellcheck.onlyMorePopular">true</str>
<str name="spellcheck.count">5</str>
<str name="spellcheck.collate">true</str>
</lst>
<arr name="components">
<str>suggest</str>
</arr>
</requestHandler>
However, when I run the following query (or something similar):
../suggest/?q=barbequ
I only get the following result xml back:
<response>
<lst name="responseHeader">
<int name="status">0</int>
<int name="QTime">78</int>
</lst>
<lst name="spellcheck">
<lst name="suggestions"/>
</lst>
</response>
As you can see, this isn't very helpful. Any suggestions to help resolve this?

Answer 1

A couple of things I can think of that might cause this problem:
The source field ("description") is incorrect - ensure that this is indeed the field that seeds terms for your spell checker. It could even be that the field is a different case (eg. "Description" instead of "description").
The source field in your schema.xml is not set up correctly or is being processed by filters that cause the source dictionary to be invalid. I use a separate field to seed the dictionary, and use <copyfield /> to copy relevant other fields to that.
The term "barbeque" doesn't appear in at least 5% of records (you've indicated this requirement by including <float name="threshold">0.05</float>) and therefore is not included in the lookup dictionary
In SpellCheckComponent the <str name="spellcheck.onlyMorePopular">true</str> setting means that only terms that would produce more results are returned as suggestions. According to the Suggester documentation this has a different function (sorting suggestions by weight) but it might be worth switching this to false to see if it is causing the issue.
Relevant parts of my schema.xml:
<schema>
<types>
<!-- Field type specifically for spell checking -->
<fieldType name="textSpell" class="solr.TextField" positionIncrementGap="100" omitNorms="true">
<analyzer type="index">
<tokenizer class="solr.StandardTokenizerFactory" />
<filter class="solr.StopFilterFactory" ignoreCase="true" words="stopwords.txt" />
<filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory" />
<filter class="solr.StandardFilterFactory" />
</analyzer>
<analyzer type="query">
<tokenizer class="solr.StandardTokenizerFactory" />
<filter class="solr.SynonymFilterFactory" synonyms="synonyms.txt" ignoreCase="true" expand="true" />
<filter class="solr.StopFilterFactory" ignoreCase="true" words="stopwords.txt" />
<filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory" />
<filter class="solr.StandardFilterFactory" />
</analyzer>
</fieldType>
</types>
<fields>
<field name="spell" type="textSpell" indexed="true" stored="false" multiValued="true" />
</fields>
<!-- Copy fields which are used to seed the spell checker -->
<copyField source="name" dest="spell" />
<copyField source="description" dest="spell" />
<schema>

Answer 2

Could the problem be that you're querying /suggest instead of /spell
../suggest/?q=barbequ
In my setup this the string I pass in:
/solr/spell?q=barbequ&spellcheck=true&spellcheck.collate=true
And the first time you do a spellcheck you need to include
&spellcheck.build=true
I'm running on solr 4 btw. So, perhaps /suggest is an entirely different endpoint that does something else. If so, apologize.

Answer 3

Please check, if the term-parameter are set in the schema.xml, like:
<field name="TEXT" type="text_en" indexed="true" stored="true" multiValued="true"
termVectors="true"
termPositions="true"
termOffsets="true"/>
...restart solr and reindex again