Phonetization

Phonetic expansion allows you to search for alternative forms that sound like the original query. For example, searching for “exaleed” would also search for “exalead”. This query expansion module works by default with the soundslike linguistic prefix handler.

This page discusses:

See Also
Configuring Query Expansion

Dependencies

For phonetization to work at search-time, you must first extract phonetic forms at indexing time. For more information, see Phonetizer.

Supported Languages

Phonetization is available natively for the following languages:

  • Canadian (ca)

  • Czech (cs)

  • Danish (da)

  • Dutch (nl)

  • English (en)

  • Estonian (et)

  • Finnish (fi)

  • French (fr)

  • German (de)

  • Italian (it)

  • Norwegian (no)

  • Portuguese (pt)

  • Slovak (sk)

  • Slovenian (sl)

  • Spanish (es)

Phonetization Options

When configuring a prefix handler’s query expansion, the following phonetization options are available.

Option

Description

max_matches or m, or matches

Searches no more than N phonetic forms for a word. If the number of available phonetic forms exceeds this value, Exalead CloudView searches the N most frequent forms in the corpus. The default value is 10.

weight or w

Relative ranking weight of the phonetic forms. This controls the w parameter of the standard term score formulas. The default value is 0.1.

For details on term score and weight, see Ranking and Sorting Search Results.