Lucene fuzzy search on a phrase (FuzzyQuery + SpanQuery)

ComplexPhraseQueryParser handles fuzzy searching on phrase words - i.e., specify the words that should be fuzzy searched and those that should not. Works as follows

Query query = new ComplexPhraseQueryParser("content", analyzer)
                    .parse("some test~ query~ blah blah");

Seems to work nicely. Not sure about performance, however but seems to work well on small data sets.

There are two likely problems here. First: I'm guessing the "contents" field is being analyzed such that "most employees apreciate" is not a term, but rather three terms. Defining as a single term is not appropriate in this case.

However, even if the content listed is a single term, a second likely problem we have is that there is too much distance between the terms to get a match. The Damerau-Levenshtein distance between mosa employee appreicata and most employees appreciate is 4 (the approximate distance, incidentally, between my average first shot at spelling "Damerau-Levenshtein" and the correct spelling). Fuzzy Query, as of 4.0, handles edit distances of no more than 2, due to performance constraints, and the assumption that larger distances are usually not particularly relevant.

If you need to perform a phrase query with fuzzy terms, you should look into either MultiPhraseQuery, or combine a set of SpanQueries (especially SpanMultiTermQueryWrapper and SpanNearQuery) to meet your needs.

SpanQuery[] clauses = new SpanQuery[3];
clauses[0] = new SpanMultiTermQueryWrapper(new FuzzyQuery(new Term("contents", "mosa")));
clauses[1] = new SpanMultiTermQueryWrapper(new FuzzyQuery(new Term("contents", "employee")));
clauses[2] = new SpanMultiTermQueryWrapper(new FuzzyQuery(new Term("contents", "appreicata")));
SpanNearQuery query = new SpanNearQuery(clauses, 0, true)

And since none of the individual terms have an edit distance greater than 2, this should be more effective.