[LUCENE-8196] Add IntervalQuery and IntervalsSource to expose minimum interval semantics across term fields

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 7.4
• Lucene Fields: New
• Assignee: Alan Woodward
• Reporter: Alan Woodward
• Created: 08/Mar/18 10:46
• Updated: 28/Aug/22 15:26
• Resolved: 03/Apr/18 08:40

Description

This ticket proposes an alternative implementation of the SpanQuery family that uses minimum-interval semantics from http://vigna.di.unimi.it/ftp/papers/EfficientAlgorithmsMinimalIntervalSemantics.pdf to implement positional queries across term-based fields.  Rather than using TermQueries to construct the interval operators, as in LUCENE-2878 or the current Spans implementation, we instead use a new IntervalsSource object, which will produce IntervalIterators over a particular segment and field.  These are constructed using various static helper methods, and can then be passed to a new IntervalQuery which will return documents that contain one or more intervals so defined.

Issue Links

• relates to: LUCENE-6226 Add interval iterators to Scorer
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #334
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #334