[Ferret-talk] Similar words

[Robert Hulme]

> So the problem you have is where to pull recommendations from. For my
> own needs, I use a spell checker to do the "did you mean", which means
> my data source is external, and thus I never hit the index twice.
No :-)

I definitely need to pull the recommendations from the Ferret index  
(or reimplement this bit of Ferret in Ruby). I can't use spell checker  
with an ordinary dictionary because the terms that are stored in my  
index (which is an index of Protein Databank File headers among other  
things) are often not ordinary words. I *could* build my own  
dictionary of all the words that are indexed, then loop through those  
and compute the levenstein distance for each - but that's obviously  
what query~ does (it must query a Ferret dictionary to find the  
matches with a levenstein distance less than foo, then create a query  
that does word1 or word2 or word 3...), so it seems extraordinarily  
silly (not to mention slow) to reimplement (in Ruby) something that is  
already in Ferret.

My question really is whether access to this information is exposed  
throught the Ferret API. I think a Ferret developer is needed to  
answer this question.
>


I'm very surprised that I'm the first person (AFAICT from searching  
the mailing list archive) to ask this question.

-Rob