When an application user provides individual search terms in a query, the Automatic Phrasing feature groups those individual terms into a search phrase and returns query results for the phrase.
Automatic phrasing enables you to make searches more accurate and to eliminate irrelevant results. It does this by disabling features that increase the number of possible matches for the search term that the user enters. These features include thesaurus entries, stemming, and spelling correction.
For example, if automatic phrasing is enabled and a user enters "blue shoe" as search terms, MDEX looks for the phrase "blue shoe" in your phrase dictionary. If "blue shoe" exists in your phrase dictionary, the query will match only the exact phrase "blue shoe". It will not match any thesaurus entries, it will not perform stemming (matching "shoes", for example), and it will not perform spelling correction. It will not match the words in the phrase separately, or in any other order; that is, it will not match "shoe blue". Automatic phrasing also eliminates cross-field matching.
For example, if you use the phrase "dress shoes" as your search term, the query results will not include separate products that have "dress" and "shoes" in their individual description fields.
Note
You enable automatic phrasing through the element
<property name="autoPhraseEnabled" value="true"
/> in
assembler-context.xml.
The "Did You Mean?" feature will remain enabled, however, enabling you to choose alternate search phrases if you have configured them. For example, if you have configured the phrase "blue suede shoes", you will be prompted to select or reject this alternate search term.
This feature is available only for record search.
The Automatic Phrasing feature works by:
Comparing individual search terms in a query to a list of application-specific search phrases. The list of search phrases are stored in a project’s phrase dictionary.
Returning query results that are either based on the automatically-phrased query, or returning results based on the original unphrased query along with automatically-phrased Did You Mean (DYM) alternatives.
