Custom Analyzers

Overview

In Elasticsearch, a custom analyzer is a user-defined text analysis pipeline tailored to specific or complex text processing requirements. The custom analyzer is composed of three main building blocks, which are:

• Character filters: They preprocess the text input by modifying or replacing characters before it is tokenized into individual terms (words).

• Tokenizer: It is responsible for breaking the text input into individual tokens based on some rules (e.g., whitespace, punctuation, etc.).

• Token filters: They modify individual tokens (terms) generated by the tokenizer, such as lowercasing words, removing stop words, stemming, etc.

Creating a custom analyzer involves defining the main components of the analyzer (character filters, tokenizer, and token filters), which allows users to create a customized text analysis tool that can handle specific or non-standard text input.

Custom analyzers are especially useful for handling domain-specific terminology, multilingual text, or complex language processing requirements. Once defined, custom analyzers can be registered with Elasticsearch for indexing and searching text data.