I want to use the twitter search api to search for some famous person. For instance I want to search for a particular "Mr Patrick Lee C K". I would construct my search term to be something like:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%22lee+c+k%22+OR+%22patrick+lee%22
However, knowing that tweets are often informal, I know that sometimes people can address him by his initials 'lck'. To increase the precision of my search, I figure it would be better if my query can associate with his company, for instance my query could also be lck microsoft.
Now, i want to string these 3 search terms "patrick lee"/"lee c k"/lck microsoft together in one query. I probably will use OR. Then again, my last search term should not be a fixed phrase i.e word lck and microsoft can be some distance from each other.
Can anyone tell me how should i link these search terms together inside one query?
Stringing your queries together with "OR" is the best way to do this. The best way to do this is by searching "patrick lee" OR "lee c k" OR lck microsoft. Note that proximity queries are not supported by the Twitter Search API.
There's a few reasons why: 1) The search query only counts towards one count of your API limit, despite it being a fairly expensive query and 2) even though you can't really do a proximity query for "lck microsoft", Tweets are only 140 characters and chances are that those terms would be fairly close to each other regardless. In fact, eliminating the quotes around "lee c k" might actually raise your recall without compromising too much precision.
The features available on the Twitter Advanced Search page are the full list of features that you can use in your search query.
Related
Just starting to learn Solr for a project at work and was wondering on how to go about this issue. Our application allows a user to search based on a business name. The business name is comprised of 3 different categories ( English, French and Combined Name ). Based on a single query entered by the user, how would one go about using Solr to provide the most relevant search results? I have looked into fuzzy and proximity searches which seem reasonable enough. Although fuzzy search only applies to a single term, which makes me believe that I would need to split the query into single terms and apply fuzzy search to each and merge the results if I were to use it ? My question is how to best approach the problem ? Thanks!
To provide relevancy to your documents , you need to have a combination of proper boosting queries and your priorities as what relevance means to your use case . If Regex based search is included in use case you may go for NGrams , if exact search is what you seeking for , boosting is important . You can use parameters like phrase slope , mm, and other edismax parameters to your advantage . You may use a combination of title and text content search, with a good combination of boosts . Also , Solr allows you to pass your query in parenthesis, that functions like an SQL IN query , that further boosts relevancy in your documents by sticking to keywords only mentioned in the query . And , at last , if all these doesn't suffice, you may use custom function queries to meet your needs . While doing all this, just keep in mind the Analyzers in schema.xml file are just right and serve the purpose to execute above mentioned queries .
You can go as far down this rabbit-hole as you have time for wrt Business Name search. (Fuzzy, sound-alike, language-specific analysis, weird compounded-terms used as a domain name (eg: getting "EZBake" to match "easy bake", or "1-to-1" to match "one to one" is non-trivial)
Since this sounds like a pre-existing application, I typically look to query logs (when available) to sample the frequency of different types of mismatches (dig out the zero-result search terms and start manually categorizing the high-level issues behind the more common mismatches).
That will provide you with a backlog of "matching use cases to research how to implement" (in the order of maximal benefit, as determined by your sample).
Then you're ready to start burning them down, and asking much more specific questions about how to get Solr to jump through your domain-specific hoops.
I have been trying to come across a query builder for Neo4j's query language Cypher, ideally using a fluent API. I did not find much, and decided to invest some time on building one myself.
The result so far is a fluent API query builder for the Cypher 1.9 spec.
I wanted to use StackOverflow to kick off a discussion and see what the thoughts are, before I release the code.
Here is a demo query that you would want to send off to Neo4j using Cypher.
Show me all people who John knows who know software engineers at Google (Google company code assumed to be 12345).
The relationship strength between John and the people who connect him to Google employees should be at least 3 (assuming a range from 1-5).
Return all of John's connections and the people they know at Google, including the relationships between those people.
Sort the results by name of John's connections in ascending order and then by relationship strength in descending order.
Using Fluent-Cypher:
Cypher
.on(Node.named("john").with(Index.named("PERSON_NAMES").match(Key.named("name").is("John"))))
.on(Node.named("google").with(Id.is(12345)))
.match(Connection.named("rel1").andType("KNOWS").between("john").and("middle"))
.match(Connection.named("rel2").andType("KNOWS").between("middle").and("googleEmployee"))
.match(Connection.withType("WORKS_AT").from("googleEmployee").to("google"))
.where(Are.allOfTheseTrue(Column.named("rel1.STRENGTH").isGreaterThanOrEqualTo(3)
.and(Column.named("googleEmployee.TITLE").isEqualTo("Software Engineer"))))
.returns(Columns.named("rel1", "middle", "rel2", "googleEmployee"))
.orderBy(Asc.column("middle.NAME"), Desc.column("rel1.STRENGTH"))
which yields the following query:
START john=node:PERSON_NAMES(name='John'),google=node(12345) MATCH john-[rel1:KNOWS]-middle,middle-[rel2:KNOWS]-googleEmployee,googleEmployee-[:WORKS_AT]->google WHERE ((rel1.STRENGTH >= '3' AND googleEmployee.TITLE = 'Software Engineer')) RETURN rel1,middle,rel2,googleEmployee ORDER BY middle.NAME ASC,rel1.STRENGTH DESC
I agree that you should build this with an eye towards Cypher 2.0. As of 2.0, it's very important that WHERE clauses are matched up with the correct START, (OPTIONAL) MATCH, and WITH clauses making the design of a fluent API a bit more challenging.
I like your first example where you just use the text to describe the query. The second option, to tell you the truth, doesn't look so much easier to me than constructing the Cypher query itself. The language is quite easy to use and is well documented. Adding another layer of abstraction would only increase complexity. However, if you find a way of translating this natural language request into a Cypher request, that'd be cool :)
Also, why not start working directly with Cypher 2.0?
Finally, check out this here: http://github.com/noduslabs/infranodus – I'm working on a similar problem but for adding the nodes into the database, not querying them. I chose to use #hashtags to make it easier for people to understand how their queries should be structured (as we already use them). So in your case it could become something like
#show-all #people who #John :knows who :know #software-engineers :at #Google.
#relationship-strength between #John and the #people who are #linked to #Google #software-engineers should be at least #3
#return #all of #John's #connections and the #people they :know at #Google, including the #relationships-between those #people.
#sort the #results #by-name of #John's #connections in #ascending order and then by #relationship-strength in #descending order.
(let's say the #hashtags refer to nodes, the #at refers to actions on them)
If you could pull something like this off, I think that'd be a much better and more useful simplification of the already easy-to-use Cypher.
Lucene does not support it out of the box, so I need some help building my query.
Lets say I have the document with a field value "Develop"
I would like this document to be returned for the searches "Dev" and "lop".
Maybe creating two queries?
"*keyword"
and
"keyword*"
and
"keyword"
?
How would you go about doing this with multiple words? Would you split the sentence/search into a words list and do the previous example for each word?
What you're asking is if I understand you correctly not feasible on any large scale search engine.
Lucene creates an index over keywords using term-document matrix and inverted-file techniques (see links at the bottom). A fully fledged string matching might be very nice to have, but it does not scale: you will never be able to query a decently sized index (say more than a couple of dozen/hundreds of documents) in an acceptable time.
Still, here are two ideas that might help...
Syllable tokenization
To come back to your example with 'Develop'. As long as you are happy with letting users search for syllables I guess you can do something.
You would have to create use tokenizer that splits up words in your indexed according to their syllables and create a database index over the syllables. (I am not sure there are built in tokenizers for the English language that can do that and writing one on your own might be tricky...)
An important thing to note:
If you would index the full words AND the seperate syllables the size of your index will be much larger than if you only index one of the two.
However I would not suggest to index only syllables. If you want to also allow your users to search for the full word 'Develop' (which I guess you want) this would result in two queries with a logical and between them, namely <'dev' AND 'lop'>. Although Lucene supports such logical constructs in queries they are very expensive. I have personally had some trouble in the past using logical queries in Lucene.
Stemming
Another way to somehow arrive at what you're trying could be to use a brutal form of word stemming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming) that stems words to their first syllable. (This would allow to search for 'dev' but not for 'lop'...)
Again, I don't think such a word stem feature is already in Lucene. Writing one for yourself will be a pain and involve working with/importing huge dictionaries.
Links
These might be looking into if you don't know about search engine internals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_%28search_engine%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space_model
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_file
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term-document_matrix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf-idf
Now that I know I can no longer communicate with Twitter mashups out there, how can I create a set of related hashtags? For instance, how can I get all tags similar or related to yankees?
You might be interested in the mathematical equations for clustering related things.
Another, naive option, would be to just look at what hashtags frequently (subjective, I know) appear with a known hashtag and work from there.
You can use a term extractor on set of tweets returned by the topic of your choice. Eg: Get the list of tweets for search query 'yankees' and apply term extractor on the set of tweets you have. You can find Term Extraction APIs from Yahoo! and AlchemyAPI.
The result would set of important terms used in the tweets and you can use them with a hash to search for more related information.
Consider the following site:
http://maps.google.com
It has a main text input, where the user can type business, countries, provinces, cities, addresses and zip codes. I wonder which is the best way to implement a search like this. I realize that probably Google Maps uses a full text search with all kinds of data in the same table, and it has a chance of having a parser which classifies the input (i.e. between numeric, like zip codes and coordinates, and textual, like business and addresses).
With the data spread in many tables and systems, a parser is essential. The parser could be built from regular expressions, or could be built with IA tools like Artificial Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms.
Which approach would you recommend?
It might be best to aggregate the data from all of your tables into a search index. Lucene is a free search engine, similar to how Google's search engine works (inverted index), and it should allow you to search by any of those values or any combination of them with relative ease.
http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/
Lucene comes with its own query language (again, very similar to Google's or any other Internet search sites syntax). The only drawback of using something like Lucene is you would need to build its index. You wouldn't be querying your database directly (which could get very complicated...inverted index are pretty much designed for what your trying to do), so you need to periodically gather up new information from your database and add it to your index. It might also be necessary to rebuild your index to remove unneeded data.
With Lucene, you get a pretty flexible query syntax that most people are familiar with (because pretty much everyone searches the internet), it performs very well, and is not terribly complicated. By using Lucene, you avoid the hit of using regular expressions (which are not the most performant text searching mechanism), and you don't have to write your own parser. Should be a win-win, aside from a little learning curve to build a Lucene index generator and figure out how to query that index.
I'd have the data in one database. If the data got to big or I knew it would be huge, I'd assign an id to each business, address etc, then have other tables which reference this data.
Regular Expressions would only be necessary if the user could define what they want to search for:
business: Argos
But then what happens if they want an Argos in Manchester (Sorry, I'm English), maybe then get the location of the user based on their IP but what happens if they say:
business: Argos Scotland
Now you don't know if the company has two words, or if there is a location next to it. All of this has to be taken into consideration.
P.s Sorry if that made no sense.
You will need to pre process the query before doing a full text search on it. If you are using a GIS database, then you will already have columns like city, areacode, country etc. Convert your query into tokens seperated on space or commas, or both. Then hit individual columns to see match. This way you will know what part of the query is the city, the areacode etc.
You could also try some naive approximation approaches,example - 6 consecutive numbers will probably be an area code. Look for common words like "road" , "restaurant" , "street" etc which will be part of many queries and then use some approximation to figure out what they are looking for. Hope this helps.