Fuzzy search with lucene

Question

I implemented a fuzzy search with lucene 4.3.1, but I am not satisfied with the result. I would like to indicate a series of results that he should return. So, for example, if I want 10 results, he should return the top 10 matches, no matter how bad they are. Most of the time it doesn’t return anything if the word I'm looking for is very different from everything in the index. How can I achieve more / more crazy results?

Here is the code I have:

public String[] luceneQuery(String query, int numberOfHits, String path) throws ParseException, IOException { File dir = new File(path); Directory index = FSDirectory.open(dir); query = query + "~"; Query q = new QueryParser(Version.LUCENE_43, "label", analyzer) .parse(query); IndexReader reader = DirectoryReader.open(index); IndexSearcher searcher = new IndexSearcher(reader); Query fuzzyQuery = new FuzzyQuery(new Term("label", query), 2); ScoreDoc[] fuzzyHits = searcher.search(fuzzyQuery, numberOfHits).scoreDocs; String[] fuzzyResults = new String[fuzzyHits.length]; for (int i = 0; i < fuzzyHits.length; ++i) { int docId = fuzzyHits[i].doc; Document d = searcher.doc(docId); fuzzyResults[i] = d.get("label"); } reader.close(); return fuzzyResults; } 

Answer 1

Long distance editing is no longer supported by FuzzyQuery in Lucene 4.x. The current FuzzyQuery implementation is a huge performance improvement from the Lucene 3.x implementation, but only supports two changes. Distances exceeding 2 Damerau-Levenshtein changes are considered rarely useful.

According to the FuzzyQuery documentation , if you really should have higher editing distances:

If you really want this, consider using the n-gram indexing method (for example, SpellChecker in the proposed module).

The strong consequence is that you have to rethink what you are trying to accomplish and find a more useful approach.