Dictionary chaining and stop words - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

It's nice to be able to chain tsearch dictionaries, but I find that it's
not as flexible as it should be. Currently we have these dictionaries
built-in:

dict_simple - lowercases and checks against stop word list, accepts
everything not in stop word list
dict_synonym - replaces with synonym, if found
dict_thesaurus - similar to synonym, but can recognize phrases
dict_ispell - lowercases, checks dictionary, then checks stop words
dict_snowball - lowercases, checks stop words, then stems

The way things are at the moment, you can't for example use any of the
built-in dictionaries in case-sensitive mode, without writing custom C
code. Or check against stop words before going through an ispell
dictionary (dict_simple accepts everything, so you can't put it in front
of dict_ispell). Or use ispell dictionary first, then replace synonyms
with dict_synonym, and so forth.

To make the chaining more useful, I'm proposing some changes to
dictionary API and the set of built-in dictionaries. Currently, a
dictionary can either:
- Accept the word (and possibly replace it with something else)
- Reject the word
- Do nothing

There's clearly need for transforming a word and passing on the
transformed version to the next dictionary. dict_thesaurus does exactly
that by supporting a subdictionary which is called before invoking the
thesaurus, but it should be generic capability not specific to any
dictionary. Let's modify the lexize API so that a dictionary can:
- Accept the word (and possibly input with something else)
- Reject the word
- Transform word into another (or pass on as is)

If we do that, and modularize the lowercasing and stopwords
functionality into separate dictionaries, we end up with this nice,
orthogonal set of dictionaries that you can use as building blocks for a
wide range of more complex rules:

dict_lowercase    - lowercases, doesn't accept or reject anything
dict_simple    - accepts or rejects (depending on dict option) words in
list, passes on others. This can be used for stop words functionality,
or to accept words found in a simple list of words
dict_accept    - accepts everything (for use as a terminator in the chain,
if you want to accept everything not accepted or rejected by other
dictionaries)

dict_synonym    - replaces input with synonym, passes on or accepts matches
depending on dict option
dict_thesaurus    - replaces input with preferred term, passes on or
accepts matches depending on dict option
dict_ispell    - replaces input with basic form from dictionary, passes on
or accepts matches depending on dict option
dict_snowball    - replaces input with stem, passes on

I don't know what the current plan for beta is, but it would be nice to
get the API right even though there is some work to do. I can write a
patch if no-one objects.

--  Heikki Linnakangas EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com