Apache Solr Multilingual 6.x-1.0-beta3

AboutThe goal of this project is to cleanly extend Apache Solr Search Integration to provide: * better support for non-English languages * support for multilingual search * cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) * an easy-to-use administration interfaceApache Solr Multilingual does not replace Apache Solr Search Integration but is based on it.NewsWe submitted a session for Drupal Con Copenhagen 2010 called non-English and multi-language search with Apache Solr.DetailsMotivationApache Solr Search Integration provides a (more or less) easy way to use Apache Solr as a powerful search engine for Drupal. Unfortunately, the only language that works well with it, out-of-the-box, is English.So if you run a non-English website, you need to tweak all the configuration files by hand or you lose some of the advantages that Solr provides compared to Drupal's built-in database-driven search. Doing so requires a deep knowledge of Solr and search technology in general.The entire process gets even more complicated if you run a multilingual website.That is why we started thinking about an additional module called Apache Solr Multilingual, to hide most of the complexity from a Drupal website's administrator.Language-Specific Problems * Stop Words Words you want to exclude from your search index are called stop words. The list of words strongly depends on the focus of your website and, of course, on your site's language. * Stemming Every word in the search index is stored in a reduced form called a word stem. This strategy enables the user to find content, independent of the key word's inflection, e.g. singular or plural. Unfortunately, the stemming algorithm is different from language to language. * Protected Words In some cases, you'll want to exclude certain words from the stemming described above. These protected words are language-specific, like stop words. * Compound Word Splitting Languages like German frequently combine words (e.g. "Dampfschifffahrt"). In order to deal with that problem you need to split such words into parts depending on language-specific word catalogs. * Spell Checking No doubt that spell checking should be language-specific.Apache Solr MultilingualApache Solr Multilingual provides an out-of-the-box solution to language-specific problems (described above) or supports the site administrator by providing a user interface that hides some of the complexity.Additionally, Apache Solr Multilingual provides a way to offer language-specific searches for different languages at once on multilingual websites. Therefore, Apache Solr Multilingual integrates with Drupal's standard multilingual features provided by core modules and the Internationalization module.As a special feature, Apache Solr Multilingual can be configured to deal with the translations of nodes and taxonomies on multilingual sites. That means that you can find content in any language, no matter which language was used to enter the search phrase. It's currently a simple implementation of CLIR, but our plan is to extend this feature.Current StateA third alpha version has been released for feedback. Please note that apachesolr_multilingual 6.x-1.x depends on apachesolr 6.x-1.x.apachesolr 6.x-2.x, which is currently in beta, will be supported by apachesolr_multilingual 6.x-2.xSee README.txt for installation instructions.To-Do * CCK * Additional configuration options for hard-coded settings in schema.xml and solrconfig.xml of Apache Solr Search Integration, not mentioned, above, under "Language Specific Problems".Maintainers * Markus Kalkbrenner (mkalkbrenner) * Matthias Huder (mhuder)Sponsors * Cocomore AG - For Drupal-related services, visit drupal.cocomore.comAdditional Resources * Saturday, May 8, 2010: Apache Solr Multilingual session at Drupal Dev Days Munich (German slides).

Requirements:	No special requirements
Platforms:	PHP
Keyword:	Apache,  Called,  Configuration,  Drupal,  Integration,  Language,  Languagespecific,  Multilingual,  Nonenglish,  Outofthebox,  Search,  Words
Users rating:	0/10