Inverted indexes, analyzers, relevance scoring with BM25, mappings, shards, query DSL and the ELK stack.
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- What is an inverted index?
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A data structure that maps terms to the documents and positions where they appear, enabling fast full-text search
- Why are inverted indexes efficient for text search?
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They store a mapping from each term to its documents and positions, allowing direct lookup without scanning all documents
- What is a postings list?
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A list of documents and position information for a specific term in an inverted index
- What is term vocabulary in inverted indexes?
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The collection of all unique terms extracted and indexed from documents
- What is an analyzer in Elasticsearch?
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A sequence of character filters, a tokenizer, and token filters that transforms text into searchable tokens
- Name the three components of an Elasticsearch analyzer
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Character filters, tokenizer, and token filters
- What does a tokenizer do in an analyzer?
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Splits text into individual tokens based on rules, producing a stream of tokens for further processing
- What is a token filter's role in an analyzer?
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Modifies, adds, or removes tokens produced by the tokenizer, such as lowercasing, removing stopwords, or stemming
- What does a character filter do?
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Preprocesses input text before tokenization by removing or replacing specific characters or patterns
- What does BM25 stand for?
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Best Matching 25, a probabilistic relevance framework for ranking search results
- How does BM25 handle term frequency?
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It increases scores for more frequent terms but with diminishing returns, so extra occurrences have marginal impact
- What is inverse document frequency (IDF)?
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A measure of how unique a term is across all documents, giving higher weight to rare terms and lower weight to common terms
- How does BM25 normalize for document length?
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It prevents longer documents from gaining unfair relevance advantage by normalizing scores relative to document length
- What is the default relevance scoring algorithm in Elasticsearch?
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BM25, a probabilistic algorithm that ranks documents by relevance to a query
- What is a mapping in Elasticsearch?
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A definition specifying the structure of documents in an index, including field names, types, and analysis settings