Elasticsearch complex proximity query

Question

Given that I have a query like below:

council* W/5 (tip OR tips)

The above query can be translated as: Find anything that has council* and (tip OR tips) no more than 5 words apart.

So following text will match:

• Shellharbour City Council Tip
• council best tip
• councils top 10 tips

But this one should not match:

• ... City Council at Shellharbour. There is not any good tip at all.

I need help to build an elasticsearch query for that. I was thinking about Regex query but I'm not quite sure about better alternatives. Thanks

Bovid

Answer 1

You can use a combination of the span_near query, span_multi and span_or. We can use the query below to perform the same search.

{
  "query": {
    "span_near": {
      "clauses": [
        {
          "span_multi":
          {
            "match":
            {
              "prefix": { "text": "council"}
            }
          }
        },
        {
          "span_or": {
            "clauses": [
              {
                "span_term": {
                  "text": {
                    "value": "tip"
                  }
                }
              },
              {
                "span_term": {
                  "text": {
                    "value": "tips"
                  }
                }
              }
            ]
          }
        }
      ],
      "slop": 5,
      "in_order": true
    }
  }
}

The important things to look out for are the span_term which is the text your searching for. In this example I only had one field called "text". Slop indicates the number of words we will allow between the terms, and in_order indicates that the order of words is important. So "tip council" will not match, where as "council tip" will.

Affranchise

Thank mate, that's exactly what I'm looking for. My queries are very complicated, I'll have to implement something to translate those queries using these span_* elasticsearch query. – Bovid