fuzzy (?)

Use the fuzzy (?) operator to expand queries to include words that are spelled similarly to the specified term. This type of expansion is helpful for finding more accurate results when there are frequent misspellings in the documents in the database.

Unlike stem expansion, the number of words generated by a fuzzy expansion depends on what is in the index; results can vary significantly according to the contents of the index.

Syntax

Syntax	Description
?term	Expands a query to include all terms with similar spellings as the specified term.

Examples

Input	Expands To
?cat	cat cats calc case
?feline	feline defined filtering
?apply	apply apple applied April
?read	lead real

Notes

Fuzzy works best for languages that use a 7-bit character set, such as English. It can be used, with lesser effectiveness, for languages that use an 8-bit character set, such as many Western European languages. Also, the Japanese lexer provides limited fuzzy matching.

In addition, if fuzzy returns a stopword, the stopword is not included in the query or highlighted by CTX_DOC.HIGHLIGHT or CTX_DOC.MARKUP.

If base-letter conversion is enabled for a text column and the query expression contains a fuzzy operator, Oracle operates on the base-letter form of the query.