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dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine Programmer's Reference
Synonym searching

Synonym searching finds synonyms of a word in a search request.

You can enable synonym searching for all words in a request or you can enable synonym searching selectively by adding the & character after certain words in a request. Example: fast& w/5 search 

Search flags control where dtSearch looks for synonyms for words in a search request. The four types of synonym expansion are: user synonyms, WordNet synonyms, WordNet related words, and external synonyms. 

The User Thesaurus is a user-defined set of synonyms stored in thesaur.xml. dtSearch Desktop has a dialog box to edit this thesaurus. 

The WordNet thesaurus is a concept network included with dtSearch. It includes synonyms and related words (holonyms, meronyms, antonyms, etc.). 

External synonyms are synonyms returned by an external thesaurus used with the dtSearch Engine. 

In a phrase search, synonym searching applies to the phrase, not to individual words in the phrase. For example, a search for "object lesson" with WordNet synonym expension enabled would find "example", which is a synonym for "object lesson". The individual words in the phrase, object and lesson, would not be expanded into their respective synonym lists.