Morphologic Analysis

What is Morphological Analysis?

Morphological analysis examines word structure—stems/lemmas, prefixes/suffixes, part of speech, case, number, tense—and (for some languages) compound splitting. It supplies signals for lemmatization, stemming, and language-aware indexing.

How It Works (quick)

• Tokenization: Split text into tokens; detect script and language.
• Morph parsing: Apply lexicons + rules or ML analyzers to derive lemma and morphological tags.
• Compound handling: Split or annotate compounds (e.g., German; agglutinative languages like Hungarian/Finnish).
• Fielding: Store lemma fields and phrase/bigram fields; keep exact keyword fields for brands/SKUs.
• Serving: Use lemmas/tags to improve recall and reduce noise in lexical retrieval and extraction.

Why It Matters in E-commerce

• Inflection robustness: Matches queries and titles across plural/case/tense forms.
• Better extraction: More accurate brand/material/size detection from vendor copy.
• Multilingual quality: Essential for languages with heavy inflection and compounding.

Best Practices

• Prefer lemma-based analyzers for titles/descriptions; avoid aggressive stemming.
• Protect brand, model, and SKU fields from morphological changes.
• Localize analyzers per market; maintain compound rules where needed.
• Evaluate with golden sets per language; track NDCG/MRR and error notes.
• Cache analysis; avoid per-keystroke heavy parsing in autocomplete.

Challenges

• OOV brands/models, mixed-language text, hyphen/compound edge cases, and POS ambiguity.

Examples

• Query in Hungarian matches inflected product titles due to correct case/number handling.
• German compound “Wanderschuhmembran” split to surface “Wander-schuh” + membrane intent.

Summary

Morphological analysis adds grammatical and structural insight so lexical search works across inflections and compounds. Use it to power lemma fields and extraction—while preserving exact brand/SKU handling.