Configuring Query Expansion

You can set up Exalead CloudView to broaden the scope of a user query, which is known as query expansion.

For example, you can expand queries to include synonyms, so when a user searches for dba, Exalead CloudView searches for dba OR “database administrator” OR “db admin”. If phonetic query expansion is enabled, the query “exaleed” would expand to “exaleed” OR “exalead”.

Query expansion does the following:

  • enriches the query, using synonyms and semantics

  • interprets and normalizes the query, such as by recognizing city names or acronyms.

Query expansion is configured on prefix handlers as targeting specific index fields is useful to make consistent query expansions. For example, while it makes sense to use synonyms when searching the title index field with the title: prefix handler, it does not when searching on the author index field with the author: prefix handler.


In this section:

Query Tree and Query Expansion
Query Expansion Features
Enable query expansion
Stemming
Lemmatization
Phonetization
Approximation
Normalization Exceptions
Synonyms
Japanese Synonyms