Relationship between words in synonym list?

[GoWildcats]

Is there a relationship between words in the synonym list itself? Here is an example of what I mean.

Assume I list the words Luxuries, Luxurious, Elegant, Elegance, and Classy as synonyms for the word Luxury. As I understand it, any search on the word Luxury will show results that include any instances of the words in the synonym list and vice versa. What if the user searches on the word Elegant, which is part of the synonym list? Will the results include instances of the other words in the synonym list- Luxuries, Luxurious, Elegance, and Classy?

[Ray]

What if the user searches on the word Elegant, which is part of the synonym list? Will the results include instances of the other words in the synonym list- Luxuries, Luxurious, Elegance, and Classy?

Yes, the synonyms apply both ways.

[Vernon]

A follow-up question:

Given a synonym setup where the word Luxury maps to the synonyms Luxuries, Luxurious, Elegant, Elegance, Classy, and that this works both ways, what is the meaning of the sentence in the manual, "Word: It must be a word that actually appears in the content of your website."?

Does this mean that the mapping of, say, Classy to Elegant will ONLY work if the word Luxury is actually in the web site? That is, mapping will not work between the synonyms if the "Word" itself is not indexed. I could have hundreds of references to Elegant and Classy, but it will all be to no avail if I don't have even a solitary reference to Luxury.

So, in the above example, there must actually be a reference in the site to Luxury if I want references to Classy to show up references to Elegant. True or false?

If you answer 'true', then: Since I don't know which of the synonyms is the most likely to be used (and so make it the "Word" rather than just an entry in the synonym list associated with the Word), how do I get around it? If I have

Luxury = Luxuries, Luxurious, Elegant, Elegance, Classy

but potentially no page actually containing "Luxury", should I ALSO add entries

Luxuries = Luxury, Luxurious, Elegant, Elegance, Classy
Luxurious = Luxury, Luxuries, Elegant, Elegance, Classy
Elegant = Luxury, Luxurious, Luxuries, Elegance, Classy
Elegance = Luxury, Luxurious, Luxuries, Elegant, Classy
Classy = Luxury, Luxurious, Luxuries, Elegance, Elegant

just to catch them all?

Thanks

[Ray]

Does this mean that the mapping of, say, Classy to Elegant will ONLY work if the word Luxury is actually in the web site? That is, mapping will not work between the synonyms if the "Word" itself is not indexed. I could have hundreds of references to Elegant and Classy, but it will all be to no avail if I don't have even a solitary reference to Luxury.

That is correct.

The idea is that you would be only adding synonyms when you notice certain words that need mapping to, rather than just feeding it a generic list of universal synonyms. The reason why a generic list of synonyms would not be necessary is because there is also built-in stemming capability (see "Configure"->"Languages").

In your examples above, many of those entries are unnecessary because:

Luxury, Luxuries and Luxurious are already the same (via stemming)
Elegant and Elegance are already the same (via stemming)

So you may want to revise what synonyms you actually need given what Stemming already achieves for you automatically.

[Ray]

Oops. I've just realized this is the V4 forum! Stemming is not available in V4, if this is what you are using. You may want to consider upgrading to V6 for the stemming feature. There has been a huge number of changes and improvements since V4.

[Vernon]

Thanks, Ray. Yes I'm on version 6, but posted in reply to the nearest previous post I could find.

The example my predecessor left was not good, and I'm delighted to hear that stemming will now solve many of these issues. But in reality I'm facing a site with bundles of theological terms which stemming won't solve - as I don't suppose you can get from "salvation" to "soteriology" and thence to "redemption" and "justification". (And before another theologian comes along and says these are not true synonymns, then I know, I know...)

But since my client doesn't know what issues will be posted on the site, I need to write a good synonym list beforehand.

From your answer, I guess I'll just have to have a dummy page somewhere that contains ALL my terms so that they are triggered in the index and my 'synonym' list gets heard.

Thanks.

Vernon

[Ray]

From your answer, I guess I'll just have to have a dummy page somewhere that contains ALL my terms so that they are triggered in the index and my 'synonym' list gets heard.

This could work, but you might want to deboost the page (look up "ZOOMPAGEBOOST" in the Users Guide) to make sure it doesn't show up high in the search results.