Elasticsearch - Analysis

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When a query is processed during a search operation, the content in any index is analyzed by the analysis module. This module consists of analyzer, tokenizer, tokenfilters and charfilters. If no analyzer is defined, then by default the built in analyzers, token, filters and tokenizers get registered with analysis module.

In the following example, we use a standard analyzer which is used when no other analyzer is specified. It will analyze the sentence based on the grammar and produce words used in the sentence.

POST _analyze
{
   "analyzer": "standard",
   "text": "Today's weather is beautiful"
}

On running the above code, we get the response as shown below −

{
   "tokens" : [
      {
         "token" : "today's",
         "start_offset" : 0,
         "end_offset" : 7,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 0
      },
      {
         "token" : "weather",
         "start_offset" : 8,
         "end_offset" : 15,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 1
      },
      {
         "token" : "is",
         "start_offset" : 16,
         "end_offset" : 18,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 2
      },
      {
         "token" : "beautiful",
         "start_offset" : 19,
         "end_offset" : 28,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 3
      }
   ]
}

Configuring the Standard analyzer

We can configure the standard analyser with various parameters to get our custom requirements.

In the following example, we configure the standard analyzer to have a max_token_length of 5.

For this, we first create an index with the analyser having max_length_token parameter.

PUT index_4_analysis
{
   "settings": {
      "analysis": {
         "analyzer": {
            "my_english_analyzer": {
               "type": "standard",
               "max_token_length": 5,
               "stopwords": "_english_"
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

Next we apply the analyser with a text as shown below. Please note how the token is does not appear as it has two spaces in the beginning and two spaces at the end. For the word “is”, there is a space at the beginning of it and a space at the end of it. Taking all of them, it becomes 4 letters with spaces and that does not make it a word. There should be a nonspace character at least at the beginning or at the end, to make it a word to be counted.

POST index_4_analysis/_analyze
{
   "analyzer": "my_english_analyzer",
   "text": "Today's weather is beautiful"
}

On running the above code, we get the response as shown below −

{
   "tokens" : [
      {
         "token" : "today",
         "start_offset" : 0,
         "end_offset" : 5,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 0
      },
      {
         "token" : "s",
         "start_offset" : 6,
         "end_offset" : 7,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 1
      },
      {
         "token" : "weath",
         "start_offset" : 8,
         "end_offset" : 13,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 2
      },
      {
         "token" : "er",
         "start_offset" : 13,
         "end_offset" : 15,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 3
      },
      {
         "token" : "beaut",
         "start_offset" : 19,
         "end_offset" : 24,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 5
      },
      {
         "token" : "iful",
         "start_offset" : 24,
         "end_offset" : 28,
         "type" : "",
         "position" : 6
      }
   ]
}

The list of various analyzers and their description are given in the table shown below −

Tokenizers

Tokenizers are used for generating tokens from a text in Elasticsearch. Text can be broken down into tokens by taking whitespace or other punctuations into account. Elasticsearch has plenty of built-in tokenizers, which can be used in custom analyzer.

An example of tokenizer that breaks text into terms whenever it encounters a character which is not a letter, but it also lowercases all terms, is shown below −

POST _analyze
{
   "tokenizer": "lowercase",
   "text": "It Was a Beautiful Weather 5 Days ago."
}

On running the above code, we get the response as shown below −

{
   "tokens" : [
      {
         "token" : "it",
         "start_offset" : 0,
         "end_offset" : 2,
         "type" : "word",
         "position" : 0
      },
      {
         "token" : "was",
         "start_offset" : 3,
         "end_offset" : 6,
         "type" : "word",
         "position" : 1
      },
      {
         "token" : "a",
         "start_offset" : 7,
         "end_offset" : 8,
         "type" : "word",
         "position" : 2
      },
      {
         "token" : "beautiful",
         "start_offset" : 9,
         "end_offset" : 18,
         "type" : "word",
         "position" : 3
      },
      {
         "token" : "weather",
         "start_offset" : 19,
         "end_offset" : 26,
         "type" : "word",
         "position" : 4
      },
      {
         "token" : "days",
         "start_offset" : 29,
         "end_offset" : 33,
         "type" : "word",
         "position" : 5
      },
      {
         "token" : "ago",
         "start_offset" : 34,
         "end_offset" : 37,
         "type" : "word",
         "position" : 6
      }
   ]
}

A list of Tokenizers and their descriptions are shown here in the table given below −