Xapian discuss - Aug 2011 - How term distance impacts the weight?

Hey,

I start using Xapian for more than 1 months, it is very nice.

When I look at the weight, I saw that each term will be associated with
position.in doc

I wonder how position used in query? how it impacts the weight of search?
could anyone shed light on this?

Can I understand that position is more useful for Oriental language like
Chinese, Japanese Korean than for Western Languages,
because Oriental language need word segmentation?

thanks,
Bruce

On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 12:12:59AM +0800, Bruce Zhang
wrote:
> I wonder how position used in query? how it impacts the weight of search?
> could anyone shed light on this?
Currently positional data is use for phrase searching, and for proximity
operators (NEAR and ADJ).

It's very likely someone will implement weighting based on proximity at
some point, but nobody has yet.
> Can I understand that position is more useful for Oriental language like
> Chinese, Japanese Korean than for Western Languages,
> because Oriental language need word segmentation?
I don't see why it would be inherently more useful there, though I don't
know any of those languages in great detail.

Cheers,
    Olly