CODEWITHSUNDEEP
neo4jcypher
gokul
gokul

Reputation: 133

How to implement fuzzy search

I'm using Neo4j 3 REST API and i have node named customer it has properties like name etc i need to get search results of name of customer eg i should get results for name "john" for my input "joan".how to implement fuzzy search to get my desired results.

Thanks in advance

Upvotes: 7

Views: 4364

Answers (3)

cheddarDev
cheddarDev

Reputation: 242

You will have to try using https://neo4j.com/developer/kb/how-to-perform-a-soundex-search/ which in this case will work. If your input is Joan you will not get John as the response, unless you just give jo as input in which you will get both. To get what you are expecting you will have to use the soundex search.

Upvotes: 1

avirr
avirr

Reputation: 668

Stepping back a little, what is the problem you are trying to solve with fuzzy matching?

My experience has been that misspellings and typos are far less common than you might think, and humans prefer exact matches whenever possible. If there is no exact match (often just missing a space between words), that's a good time to use a spellchecker, and that's where the fuzzy matching should kick in.

In addition, your example would match "joan" to "john", but some synonyms like "joanie" would be more useful. If you have a big corpus of content to work with, you may be able to extract some relationships, using fuzzy & machine learning to identify "joanne" and "joni" as possible synonyms and then submit that to a human curator. "Jon" looks like a related name but it's not, while "jo" and even "nonie" may or may not be nicknames in these groupings.

Upvotes: 0

Brian Underwood
Brian Underwood

Reputation: 10856

First off, I want to make that you know that if you're using Neo4j 3.x that 3.x is currently in beta and isn't considered stable yet.

You have two options to implement a fuzzy search in Neo4j. You can use the legacy indexes to implement Lecene-based indexing. That should provide anything that Lucene can do, though you'd probably need to do a bit more work. You can also implement your own unmanaged extension which will allow you to use Lucene a bit more directly.

Perhaps the easier alternative is to use elasticsearch with Neo4j and have elasticsearch do your full-text indexing. You might take a look at the Neo4j and ElasticSearch page on neo4j.com. There they provide a link to a GitHub repository which is a plugin for Neo4j which automagically updates ElasticSearch with data from Neo4j and which provides and endpoint for querying your graph fuzzily. There is also a video tutorial on how to do this.

Upvotes: 5

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