Thunderstone Search Appliance Manual

Using the Thesaurus Feature

You can create a thesaurus to either replace or add to the default thesaurus. The creation procedure is the same for either usage. Note that a thesaurus is not limited to synonyms. It can contain anything you wish to associate with a particular word: i.e., identities, generalities, or specifics of the word entry, plus associated phrases, acronyms, or spelling variations. The Search Appliance maintains a collection of thesauruses that you upload. For each profile you may select which, if any, thesaurus to use.

Here are the steps to use the thesaurus feature.

Create a thesaurus file. Use the syntax described in the document "User Equivalence File Format" at the following URL: http://docs.thunderstone.com/site/texisman/user_equivalence_file_format.html
That document refers to the thesaurus as an "equivalence file".
Upload your thesaurus to the Search Appliance. At the main menu click System, Modules, Thesaurus. Existing custom thesauruses can be downloaded by clicking on their name.
In the Name field, enter a symbolic name that will be listed as an option in search settings. This name does not have to be related to the filename on disk in any way The name can contain letters, numbers, dash, or underscore.
In the Permutations field, choose a value. This value controls how many variations of your defined terms to create during indexing of your uploaded source file. Here is an example of the effect of the various values.
Assume a thesaurus entry of: car,ford,chevy,toyota
Permutation None: Just the terms as you entered them. Query "car" would find "car", "ford", "chevy", and "toyota". Query "ford" would only find "ford".
Permutations Single: The terms you entered and the reverse. Same as above plus a query for any of "ford", "chevy", or "toyota" would find "car".
Permutations Full: Equate every term with every other in each entry. Same as above plus a query for "ford" would find "chevy" and "toyota".
In the New File field, enter (or browse to) the file on your disk to upload. Click Save Changes to upload and index the file. When indexing is completed, you will receive a report about the indexing. If Show results of indexing is checked, you will also get a summary of the indexed words.
After your thesaurus is installed on the Search Appliance you can go to Search Settings for a profile to activate the thesaurus. There are three related options: Synonyms, Main thesaurus, and Secondary Thesaurus.
Set Synonyms using the following information. Synonyms indicates how you want to apply a thesaurus (either yours or the default) to queries.
Disabled: no phrase recognition and no synonyms (equivalences)
Phrase recognition only: recognize query word groups that are known phrases and search for them as phrases
Phrases & Allow synonyms: phrase recognition plus allowing the tilde ( ) operator to match synonyms on specific query terms
Phrases & Use synonyms by default: phrase recognition and matching synonyms on all query terms (tilde to turn off on specific terms).
Set the Main Thesaurus and Secondary Thesaurus fields by using the following information. If you want to use only your thesaurus and not the default one, select yours for the Main Thesaurus option and leave verb`Secondary Thesaurus` set to none. If you want the default in addition to your own, leave Main Thesaurus set to Built-In and set Secondary Thesaurus to yours. The names listed in these options are the symbolic names (Name field) you gave your thesauruses when uploading them.
Click Update to apply these settings. There is no need to check Apply Appearance, and these settings are applied to both Test Search and Live Search.