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Dawid Weiss commented on LUCENE-8776: ------------------------------------- I just wanted to chip in a lateral idea that crossed my mind - if these offsets are required only for highlighting then one could get around the problem stated in the description of this issue by indexing positions only and retrieving hit position offsets using matches API. These positions would have to be retrieved using a *different* attribute than offsets attribute but that attribute could go backwards... Yes, it would require re-parsing the content for highlighting but it would also be a clean and elegant solution to the original problem without the need to hack Lucene internals. There is a fresh set of components that could be used for building such a highlighter on top of matches API in LUCENE-9439. All that would be needed is a specific implementation of position-to-offsets strategy that retrieves those arbitrary offsets for a token's position. I think this could work. Just a thought. > Start offset going backwards has a legitimate purpose > ----------------------------------------------------- > > Key: LUCENE-8776 > URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-8776 > Project: Lucene - Core > Issue Type: Bug > Components: core/search > Affects Versions: 7.6 > Reporter: Ram Venkat > Priority: Major > > Here is the use case where startOffset can go backwards: > Say there is a line "Organic light-emitting-diode glows", and I want to run > span queries and highlight them properly. > During index time, light-emitting-diode is split into three words, which > allows me to search for 'light', 'emitting' and 'diode' individually. The > three words occupy adjacent positions in the index, as 'light' adjacent to > 'emitting' and 'light' at a distance of two words from 'diode' need to match > this word. So, the order of words after splitting are: Organic, light, > emitting, diode, glows. > But, I also want to search for 'organic' being adjacent to > 'light-emitting-diode' or 'light-emitting-diode' being adjacent to 'glows'. > The way I solved this was to also generate 'light-emitting-diode' at two > positions: (a) In the same position as 'light' and (b) in the same position > as 'glows', like below: > ||organic||light||emitting||diode||glows|| > | |light-emitting-diode| |light-emitting-diode| | > |0|1|2|3|4| > The positions of the two 'light-emitting-diode' are 1 and 3, but the offsets > are obviously the same. This works beautifully in Lucene 5.x in both > searching and highlighting with span queries. > But when I try this in Lucene 7.6, it hits the condition "Offsets must not go > backwards" at DefaultIndexingChain:818. This IllegalArgumentException is > being thrown without any comments on why this check is needed. As I explained > above, startOffset going backwards is perfectly valid, to deal with word > splitting and span operations on these specialized use cases. On the other > hand, it is not clear what value is added by this check and which highlighter > code is affected by offsets going backwards. This same check is done at > BaseTokenStreamTestCase:245. > I see others talk about how this check found bugs in WordDelimiter etc. but > it also prevents legitimate use cases. Can this check be removed? -- This message was sent by Atlassian Jira (v8.3.4#803005) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: issues-unsubscr...@lucene.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: issues-h...@lucene.apache.org