Search

Why doesn't the search return all of the answers that contain that word in a non-English interface?

Environment:

Phrase Searching, Language Interfaces

Issue:

When searching for an answer on our non-English interface, we do not always get answers returned that include the specific word we are searching for.

That is, I can search for a specific word that I know is in an answer, but that answer is not included in the search results.

Resolution:

Word stemming is applied differently in different languages, word stemming is applied to an answer depending on the language of the answer. Word stemming is applied to search terms based on the language of the interface you are running the report in.

For example, “morgen” would be stemmed differently in a Dutch answer than an English answer. If you searched in an English interface for “morgen” the stem of your search term is calculated in English. Then when it is compared to the stem of the answer’s words, it only matched the English answer’s stem, because the Dutch answer’s stem is different. Similarly, when searching in the Dutch interface, your search terms are stemmed into Dutch. Only the Dutch stemmed answer will match your search, because your search is also stemmed in Dutch. 

Note: Occasionally a word may be stemmed the same in two languages. For example in English and Dutch, the word “violet” is stemmed the same. Therefore a search from an English interface for the word “violet” may return Dutch answers and a search from a Dutch interface for “violet” may return English answers. This is only a coincidence, however and most of the time searching for words will only return answers that are in the same language as the interface you are searching from.

When using a report to search for answers by keyword, your report will only return answers that are stemmed the same as your search term. The stemming of the search term is determined by the interface you are running the report from, and the stemming of the answer is determined by the language of the answer. Therefore, when searching for Answers by keyword, you should run the report from an interface in the same language as the desired answers.

You cannot build a report to search for answers from all languages based on keyword, since the search term will be stemmed to the language of the interface you are running the report from and may not match the same term stemmed in different languages.