[LUCENE-8477] Improve handling of inner disjunctions in intervals

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 8.1
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Alan Woodward
• Reporter: Alan Woodward
• Created: 03/Sep/18 12:44
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 15:35
• Resolved: 27/Mar/19 11:26

Description

The current implementation of the disjunction interval produced by Intervals.or is a direct implementation of the OR operator from the Vigna paper.  This produces minimal intervals, meaning that (a) is preferred over (a b), and (b) also over (a b).  This has advantages when it comes to counting intervals for scoring, but also has drawbacks when it comes to matching.  For example, a phrase query for ((a OR (a b)) BLOCK (c)) will not match the document (a b c), because (a) will be preferred over (a b), and (a c) does not match.

This ticket is to discuss the best way of dealing with disjunctions.

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #620