heatherleaf / heatherleaf/korpsearch

Regular expressions can be very slow

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#20 3 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Dominant language
Python
Stars
2
Forks
6
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No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Currently regular expressions within tokens ([word="a.*e"]) are handled by finding all words in the lexicon that matches the query, and then create a disjunction of all of those, i.e., [word="abalone"|word="abate"|...|word="azure"]. For general regexes this becomes a very large query, and slow.

Sometimes it's simply better to filter the results afterwards.

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Research direction

Start by tracing how regular expressions inside token queries are converted into lexicon matches and then expanded into a disjunction. Compare the generated query size and performance for a general regex such as [word="a.*e"]. Done means regex queries avoid unnecessarily large expansions while preserving their matching behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
search
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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