Managing special words

Because searching in Portfolio is dependent on matching specific words, special words configuration allows administrators to improve search results through the use of stopwords and synonyms. Stopwords and synonyms are collectively referred to as special words.

	You must have the proper privilege assigned to your account in order to view the Special Words Configuration page.

Services confirmation

If the special words services are active, you will be presented with the following confirmation message: "Confirmed that services are up. Special words actions are available as links listed below." Any other message indicates there was a problem communicating with the service, and troubleshooting will be required.

Index Type

The index type specifies the expected character set used in the index. The two options include default (typical Latin alphabet) or cjk (special characters from China, Japan, and Korea). This selection is necessary for all special words actions.

	The SirsiDynix provided synonym template cannot be applied to a cjk index.

Special words actions

You can upload, download, or delete both synonyms and stopwords using the provided links.

Synonyms allow libraries to relax the specificity required to find matches by providing lists of common variations. A sample list of English synonyms has been packaged with Portfolio that can be applied. Once applied, this sample list can be downloaded, customized, and uploaded again as desired.

Stopwords are ignored by the indexing engine, and are typically words that help a reader understand context, but aren't useful to a search index. For example, "this", "that", and articles like "the" and "a" shouldn't be indexed, as they're unlikely to be used alone in a title.

	Using the same words in both stopword and synonym lists can cause unexpected behavior and should be avoided.

For more information, see these topics: