[Koha] Solr

[Jared Camins-Esakov]

Stacy,



> Solr allows the use of stopwords (as would a decent query parser such as
> the one I propose writing). However, the Solr code in Koha right now does
> not make use of the stopwords feature. To my mind, that is a good thing. If
> we used stopwords, the poetry journal The would be unfindable (and yes,
> there is such a journal: I had a nightmare and a half trying to find the
> record when I had an issue to catalog at the NYPL; thankfully their catalog
> doesn't throw away stopwords anymore). And things would be even worse when
> searching for French books. Consider the case of the À thé and Le thé. In
> the US we would probably search for "a the" and "le the." If someone can
>

Whoops, I accidentally deleted several sentences when I hit send. Picking
up where I left off:

If someone can make a compelling case for stopwords, we could, of course,
add their use to the proposal as an optional feature. That said, it is my
opinion that any catalog that requires stopwords in order to offer relevant
results is broken. Relevance ranking should take into account that a given
word in a query is statistically overrepresented in the results, and
therefore should be considered less relevant than other words in the query.

Regards,
Jared

-- 
Jared Camins-Esakov
Bibliographer, C & P Bibliography Services, LLC
(phone) +1 (917) 727-3445
(e-mail) jcamins at cpbibliography.com
(web) http://www.cpbibliography.com/