Knowledgebase:
How do spell:suggest() and spell:suggest-detailed() arrive at their suggestions?
29 August 2013 02:44 PM

Introduction

spell:suggest() and spell:suggest-detailed aren't simply looking for character differences between the provided strings and the strings in your dictionaries - they're also factoring in differences in the resulting phonetics represented by these strings.

Detail

There is an undocumented option that can be passed along to increase the phonetic-distance threshold (which is 1, by default). For example, consider the following:

xquery version "1.0-ml";

spell:suggest-detailed(('customDictionary.xml'),'acknowledgment', <options xmlns="http://marklogic.com/xdmp/spell"> <phonetic-distance>2</phonetic-distance> </options> )

=>

<spell:suggestion original="acknowledgment"
dictionary="customDictionary.xml"
xmlns:xml="http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace"
xmlns:spell="http://marklogic.com/xdmp/spell"> <spell:word distance="9" key-distance="2" word-distance="45"
levenshtein-distance="1">acknowledgement</spell:word> </spell:suggestion>

Note that the option "distance-threshold" corresponds to "distance" in the result, and "phonetic-distance" corresponds to "key-distance."

Also note that increasing the phonetic-distance may cause spell:suggest() and spell:suggest-detailed() to use significantly more CPU. Metaphones are short keys, so a larger distance may match a very large fraction of the dictionary, which would then mean each of those matches would need to be checked in the distance algorithms.

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