488 lines
20 KiB
Plaintext
488 lines
20 KiB
Plaintext
[[search-aggregations-bucket-significanttext-aggregation]]
|
|
=== Significant Text Aggregation
|
|
|
|
experimental[]
|
|
|
|
An aggregation that returns interesting or unusual occurrences of free-text terms in a set.
|
|
It is like the <<search-aggregations-bucket-significantterms-aggregation,significant terms>> aggregation but differs in that:
|
|
|
|
* It is specifically designed for use on type `text` fields
|
|
* It does not require field data or doc-values
|
|
* It re-analyzes text content on-the-fly meaning it can also filter duplicate sections of
|
|
noisy text that otherwise tend to skew statistics.
|
|
|
|
WARNING: Re-analyzing _large_ result sets will require a lot of time and memory. It is recommended that the significant_text
|
|
aggregation is used as a child of either the <<search-aggregations-bucket-sampler-aggregation,sampler>> or
|
|
<<search-aggregations-bucket-diversified-sampler-aggregation,diversified sampler>> aggregation to limit the analysis
|
|
to a _small_ selection of top-matching documents e.g. 200. This will typically improve speed, memory use and quality of
|
|
results.
|
|
|
|
.Example use cases:
|
|
* Suggesting "H5N1" when users search for "bird flu" to help expand queries
|
|
* Suggesting keywords relating to stock symbol $ATI for use in an automated news classifier
|
|
|
|
In these cases the words being selected are not simply the most popular terms in results. The most popular words tend to be
|
|
very boring (_and, of, the, we, I, they_ ...).
|
|
The significant words are the ones that have undergone a significant change in popularity measured between a _foreground_ and _background_ set.
|
|
If the term "H5N1" only exists in 5 documents in a 10 million document index and yet is found in 4 of the 100 documents that make up a user's search results
|
|
that is significant and probably very relevant to their search. 5/10,000,000 vs 4/100 is a big swing in frequency.
|
|
|
|
experimental[The `significant_text` aggregation is new and may change in non-backwards compatible ways if we add further text-analysis features e.g. phrase detection]
|
|
|
|
==== Basic use
|
|
|
|
In the typical use case, the _foreground_ set of interest is a selection of the top-matching search results for a query
|
|
and the _background_set used for statistical comparisons is the index or indices from which the results were gathered.
|
|
|
|
Example:
|
|
|
|
[source,js]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
GET news/article/_search
|
|
{
|
|
"query" : {
|
|
"match" : {"content" : "Bird flu"}
|
|
},
|
|
"aggregations" : {
|
|
"my_sample" : {
|
|
"sampler" : {
|
|
"shard_size" : 100
|
|
},
|
|
"aggregations": {
|
|
"keywords" : {
|
|
"significant_text" : { "field" : "content" }
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
// CONSOLE
|
|
// TEST[setup:news]
|
|
|
|
|
|
Response:
|
|
|
|
[source,js]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
{
|
|
"took": 9,
|
|
"timed_out": false,
|
|
"_shards": ...,
|
|
"hits": ...,
|
|
"aggregations" : {
|
|
"my_sample": {
|
|
"doc_count": 100,
|
|
"keywords" : {
|
|
"doc_count": 100,
|
|
"buckets" : [
|
|
{
|
|
"key": "h5n1",
|
|
"doc_count": 4,
|
|
"score": 4.71235374214817,
|
|
"bg_count": 5
|
|
}
|
|
...
|
|
]
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
// NOTCONSOLE
|
|
|
|
The results show that "h5n1" is one of several terms strongly associated with bird flu.
|
|
It only occurs 5 times in our index as a whole (see the `bg_count`) and yet 4 of these
|
|
were lucky enough to appear in our 100 document sample of "bird flu" results. That suggests
|
|
a significant word and one which the user can potentially add to their search.
|
|
|
|
|
|
==== Dealing with noisy data using `filter_duplicate_text`
|
|
Free-text fields often contain a mix of original content and mechanical copies of text (cut-and-paste biographies, email reply chains,
|
|
retweets, boilerplate headers/footers, page navigation menus, sidebar news links, copyright notices, standard disclaimers, addresses).
|
|
|
|
In real-world data these duplicate sections of text tend to feature heavily in `significant_text` results if they aren't filtered out.
|
|
Filtering near-duplicate text is a difficult task at index-time but we can cleanse the data on-the-fly at query time using the
|
|
`filter_duplicate_text` setting.
|
|
|
|
|
|
First let's look at an unfiltered real-world example using the http://research.signalmedia.co/newsir16/signal-dataset.html[Signal media dataset] of
|
|
a million news articles covering a wide variety of news. Here are the raw significant text results for a search for the articles
|
|
mentioning "elasticsearch":
|
|
|
|
|
|
[source,js]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
{
|
|
...
|
|
"aggregations": {
|
|
"sample": {
|
|
"doc_count": 35,
|
|
"keywords": {
|
|
"doc_count": 35,
|
|
"buckets": [
|
|
{
|
|
"key": "elasticsearch",
|
|
"doc_count": 35,
|
|
"score": 28570.428571428572,
|
|
"bg_count": 35
|
|
},
|
|
...
|
|
{
|
|
"key": "currensee",
|
|
"doc_count": 8,
|
|
"score": 6530.383673469388,
|
|
"bg_count": 8
|
|
},
|
|
...
|
|
{
|
|
"key": "pozmantier",
|
|
"doc_count": 4,
|
|
"score": 3265.191836734694,
|
|
"bg_count": 4
|
|
},
|
|
...
|
|
|
|
}
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
// NOTCONSOLE
|
|
|
|
The uncleansed documents have thrown up some odd-looking terms that are, on the face of it, statistically
|
|
correlated with appearances of our search term "elasticsearch" e.g. "pozmantier".
|
|
We can drill down into examples of these documents to see why pozmantier is connected using this query:
|
|
|
|
[source,js]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
GET news/article/_search
|
|
{
|
|
"query": {
|
|
"simple_query_string": {
|
|
"query": "+elasticsearch +pozmantier"
|
|
}
|
|
},
|
|
"_source": [
|
|
"title",
|
|
"source"
|
|
],
|
|
"highlight": {
|
|
"fields": {
|
|
"content": {}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
// CONSOLE
|
|
// TEST[setup:news]
|
|
The results show a series of very similar news articles about a judging panel for a number of tech projects:
|
|
|
|
[source,js]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
{
|
|
...
|
|
"hits": {
|
|
"hits": [
|
|
{
|
|
...
|
|
"_source": {
|
|
"source": "Presentation Master",
|
|
"title": "T.E.N. Announces Nominees for the 2015 ISE® North America Awards"
|
|
},
|
|
"highlight": {
|
|
"content": [
|
|
"City of San Diego Mike <em>Pozmantier</em>, Program Manager, Cyber Security Division, Department of",
|
|
" Janus, Janus <em>ElasticSearch</em> Security Visualization Engine "
|
|
]
|
|
}
|
|
},
|
|
{
|
|
...
|
|
"_source": {
|
|
"source": "RCL Advisors",
|
|
"title": "T.E.N. Announces Nominees for the 2015 ISE(R) North America Awards"
|
|
},
|
|
"highlight": {
|
|
"content": [
|
|
"Mike <em>Pozmantier</em>, Program Manager, Cyber Security Division, Department of Homeland Security S&T",
|
|
"Janus, Janus <em>ElasticSearch</em> Security Visualization Engine"
|
|
]
|
|
}
|
|
},
|
|
...
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
// NOTCONSOLE
|
|
Mike Pozmantier was one of many judges on a panel and elasticsearch was used in one of many projects being judged.
|
|
|
|
As is typical, this lengthy press release was cut-and-paste by a variety of news sites and consequently any rare names, numbers or
|
|
typos they contain become statistically correlated with our matching query.
|
|
|
|
Fortunately similar documents tend to rank similarly so as part of examining the stream of top-matching documents the significant_text
|
|
aggregation can apply a filter to remove sequences of any 6 or more tokens that have already been seen. Let's try this same query now but
|
|
with the `filter_duplicate_text` setting turned on:
|
|
|
|
[source,js]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
GET news/article/_search
|
|
{
|
|
"query": {
|
|
"match": {
|
|
"content": "elasticsearch"
|
|
}
|
|
},
|
|
"aggs": {
|
|
"sample": {
|
|
"sampler": {
|
|
"shard_size": 100
|
|
},
|
|
"aggs": {
|
|
"keywords": {
|
|
"significant_text": {
|
|
"field": "content",
|
|
"filter_duplicate_text": true
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
// CONSOLE
|
|
// TEST[setup:news]
|
|
|
|
The results from analysing our deduplicated text are obviously of higher quality to anyone familiar with the elastic stack:
|
|
|
|
[source,js]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
{
|
|
...
|
|
"aggregations": {
|
|
"sample": {
|
|
"doc_count": 35,
|
|
"keywords": {
|
|
"doc_count": 35,
|
|
"buckets": [
|
|
{
|
|
"key": "elasticsearch",
|
|
"doc_count": 22,
|
|
"score": 11288.001166180758,
|
|
"bg_count": 35
|
|
},
|
|
{
|
|
"key": "logstash",
|
|
"doc_count": 3,
|
|
"score": 1836.648979591837,
|
|
"bg_count": 4
|
|
},
|
|
{
|
|
"key": "kibana",
|
|
"doc_count": 3,
|
|
"score": 1469.3020408163263,
|
|
"bg_count": 5
|
|
}
|
|
]
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
// NOTCONSOLE
|
|
|
|
Mr Pozmantier and other one-off associations with elasticsearch no longer appear in the aggregation
|
|
results as a consequence of copy-and-paste operations or other forms of mechanical repetition.
|
|
|
|
If your duplicate or near-duplicate content is identifiable via a single-value indexed field (perhaps
|
|
a hash of the article's `title` text or an `original_press_release_url` field) then it would be more
|
|
efficient to use a parent <<search-aggregations-bucket-diversified-sampler-aggregation,diversified sampler>> aggregation
|
|
to eliminate these documents from the sample set based on that single key. The less duplicate content you can feed into
|
|
the significant_text aggregation up front the better in terms of performance.
|
|
|
|
|
|
.How are the significance scores calculated?
|
|
**********************************
|
|
The numbers returned for scores are primarily intended for ranking different suggestions sensibly rather than something easily
|
|
understood by end users. The scores are derived from the doc frequencies in _foreground_ and _background_ sets. In brief, a
|
|
term is considered significant if there is a noticeable difference in the frequency in which a term appears in the subset and
|
|
in the background. The way the terms are ranked can be configured, see "Parameters" section.
|
|
|
|
**********************************
|
|
|
|
.Use the _"like this but not this"_ pattern
|
|
**********************************
|
|
You can spot mis-categorized content by first searching a structured field e.g. `category:adultMovie` and use significant_text on the
|
|
text "movie_description" field. Take the suggested words (I'll leave them to your imagination) and then search for all movies NOT marked as category:adultMovie but containing these keywords.
|
|
You now have a ranked list of badly-categorized movies that you should reclassify or at least remove from the "familyFriendly" category.
|
|
|
|
The significance score from each term can also provide a useful `boost` setting to sort matches.
|
|
Using the `minimum_should_match` setting of the `terms` query with the keywords will help control the balance of precision/recall in the result set i.e
|
|
a high setting would have a small number of relevant results packed full of keywords and a setting of "1" would produce a more exhaustive results set with all documents containing _any_ keyword.
|
|
|
|
**********************************
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
==== Limitations
|
|
|
|
|
|
===== No support for child aggregations
|
|
The significant_text aggregation intentionally does not support the addition of child aggregations because:
|
|
|
|
* It would come with a high memory cost
|
|
* It isn't a generally useful feature and there is a workaround for those that need it
|
|
|
|
The volume of candidate terms is generally very high and these are pruned heavily before the final
|
|
results are returned. Supporting child aggregations would generate additional churn and be inefficient.
|
|
Clients can always take the heavily-trimmed set of results from a `significant_text` request and
|
|
make a subsequent follow-up query using a `terms` aggregation with an `include` clause and child
|
|
aggregations to perform further analysis of selected keywords in a more efficient fashion.
|
|
|
|
|
|
===== Approximate counts
|
|
The counts of how many documents contain a term provided in results are based on summing the samples returned from each shard and
|
|
as such may be:
|
|
|
|
* low if certain shards did not provide figures for a given term in their top sample
|
|
* high when considering the background frequency as it may count occurrences found in deleted documents
|
|
|
|
Like most design decisions, this is the basis of a trade-off in which we have chosen to provide fast performance at the cost of some (typically small) inaccuracies.
|
|
However, the `size` and `shard size` settings covered in the next section provide tools to help control the accuracy levels.
|
|
|
|
==== Parameters
|
|
|
|
===== Significance heuristics
|
|
|
|
This aggregation supports the same scoring heuristics (JLH, mutual_information, gnd, chi_square etc) as the <<search-aggregations-bucket-significantterms-aggregation,significant terms>> aggregation
|
|
|
|
|
|
===== Size & Shard Size
|
|
|
|
The `size` parameter can be set to define how many term buckets should be returned out of the overall terms list. By
|
|
default, the node coordinating the search process will request each shard to provide its own top term buckets
|
|
and once all shards respond, it will reduce the results to the final list that will then be returned to the client.
|
|
If the number of unique terms is greater than `size`, the returned list can be slightly off and not accurate
|
|
(it could be that the term counts are slightly off and it could even be that a term that should have been in the top
|
|
size buckets was not returned).
|
|
|
|
To ensure better accuracy a multiple of the final `size` is used as the number of terms to request from each shard
|
|
using a heuristic based on the number of shards. To take manual control of this setting the `shard_size` parameter
|
|
can be used to control the volumes of candidate terms produced by each shard.
|
|
|
|
Low-frequency terms can turn out to be the most interesting ones once all results are combined so the
|
|
significant_terms aggregation can produce higher-quality results when the `shard_size` parameter is set to
|
|
values significantly higher than the `size` setting. This ensures that a bigger volume of promising candidate terms are given
|
|
a consolidated review by the reducing node before the final selection. Obviously large candidate term lists
|
|
will cause extra network traffic and RAM usage so this is quality/cost trade off that needs to be balanced. If `shard_size` is set to -1 (the default) then `shard_size` will be automatically estimated based on the number of shards and the `size` parameter.
|
|
|
|
|
|
NOTE: `shard_size` cannot be smaller than `size` (as it doesn't make much sense). When it is, elasticsearch will
|
|
override it and reset it to be equal to `size`.
|
|
|
|
===== Minimum document count
|
|
|
|
It is possible to only return terms that match more than a configured number of hits using the `min_doc_count` option.
|
|
The Default value is 3.
|
|
|
|
Terms that score highly will be collected on a shard level and merged with the terms collected from other shards in a second step.
|
|
However, the shard does not have the information about the global term frequencies available. The decision if a term is added to a
|
|
candidate list depends only on the score computed on the shard using local shard frequencies, not the global frequencies of the word.
|
|
The `min_doc_count` criterion is only applied after merging local terms statistics of all shards. In a way the decision to add the
|
|
term as a candidate is made without being very _certain_ about if the term will actually reach the required `min_doc_count`.
|
|
This might cause many (globally) high frequent terms to be missing in the final result if low frequent but high scoring terms populated
|
|
the candidate lists. To avoid this, the `shard_size` parameter can be increased to allow more candidate terms on the shards.
|
|
However, this increases memory consumption and network traffic.
|
|
|
|
`shard_min_doc_count` parameter
|
|
|
|
The parameter `shard_min_doc_count` regulates the _certainty_ a shard has if the term should actually be added to the candidate list or
|
|
not with respect to the `min_doc_count`. Terms will only be considered if their local shard frequency within the set is higher than the
|
|
`shard_min_doc_count`. If your dictionary contains many low frequent words and you are not interested in these (for example misspellings),
|
|
then you can set the `shard_min_doc_count` parameter to filter out candidate terms on a shard level that will with a reasonable certainty
|
|
not reach the required `min_doc_count` even after merging the local frequencies. `shard_min_doc_count` is set to `1` per default and has
|
|
no effect unless you explicitly set it.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
WARNING: Setting `min_doc_count` to `1` is generally not advised as it tends to return terms that
|
|
are typos or other bizarre curiosities. Finding more than one instance of a term helps
|
|
reinforce that, while still rare, the term was not the result of a one-off accident. The
|
|
default value of 3 is used to provide a minimum weight-of-evidence.
|
|
Setting `shard_min_doc_count` too high will cause significant candidate terms to be filtered out on a shard level.
|
|
This value should be set much lower than `min_doc_count/#shards`.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
===== Custom background context
|
|
|
|
The default source of statistical information for background term frequencies is the entire index and this
|
|
scope can be narrowed through the use of a `background_filter` to focus in on significant terms within a narrower
|
|
context:
|
|
|
|
[source,js]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
GET news/article/_search
|
|
{
|
|
"query" : {
|
|
"match" : {
|
|
"content" : "madrid"
|
|
}
|
|
},
|
|
"aggs" : {
|
|
"tags" : {
|
|
"significant_text" : {
|
|
"field" : "content",
|
|
"background_filter": {
|
|
"term" : { "content" : "spain"}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
// CONSOLE
|
|
// TEST[setup:news]
|
|
|
|
The above filter would help focus in on terms that were peculiar to the city of Madrid rather than revealing
|
|
terms like "Spanish" that are unusual in the full index's worldwide context but commonplace in the subset of documents containing the
|
|
word "Spain".
|
|
|
|
WARNING: Use of background filters will slow the query as each term's postings must be filtered to determine a frequency
|
|
|
|
|
|
===== Dealing with source and index mappings
|
|
|
|
Ordinarily the indexed field name and the original JSON field being retrieved share the same name.
|
|
However with more complex field mappings using features like `copy_to` the source
|
|
JSON field(s) and the indexed field being aggregated can differ.
|
|
In these cases it is possible to list the JSON _source fields from which text
|
|
will be analyzed using the `source_fields` parameter:
|
|
|
|
[source,js]
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
GET news/article/_search
|
|
{
|
|
"query" : {
|
|
"match" : {
|
|
"custom_all" : "elasticsearch"
|
|
}
|
|
},
|
|
"aggs" : {
|
|
"tags" : {
|
|
"significant_text" : {
|
|
"field" : "custom_all",
|
|
"source_fields": ["content" , "title"]
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
}
|
|
--------------------------------------------------
|
|
// CONSOLE
|
|
// TEST[setup:news]
|
|
|
|
|
|
===== Filtering Values
|
|
|
|
It is possible (although rarely required) to filter the values for which buckets will be created. This can be done using the `include` and
|
|
`exclude` parameters which are based on a regular expression string or arrays of exact terms. This functionality mirrors the features
|
|
described in the <<search-aggregations-bucket-terms-aggregation,terms aggregation>> documentation.
|
|
|
|
|