The Greeklish plugin generates tokens with latin characters from greek tokens.

The generated tokens have the save position and the same offset with the original greek tokens. A detailed example of how to use this plugin you can be found in the wiki

Build the plugin

sudo apt-get install maven

cd elasticsearch-analysis-greeklish

mvn package

Installation

sudo bin/elasticsearch-plugin install file:///path/to/plugin.zip

There are more than one combinations of latin characters that can substitute each character of the greek alphabet. So, a greek token is expanded to as many greeklish tokens as the the combinations of the latin characters for each greek character of a token and in some cases this produces an enormous number of expansions. In order to prevent this from happening, a threshold of the max expansions is set. The default value is 20.

However, a threshold of the max expansions can be set in the elasticsearch.yml When this threshold is reached the remaining characters are substitute with the most common variant of the greek character.

Example usage:

index:
  analysis:
    filter:
      greeklish_analysis:
        type: greeklish
        max_expansions: 15

It is difficult to distinguish a greeklish word from an english one during a query. So, if we wanted to stem the greeklish word in order to have the same results for the different forms of this word, we should apply a stemmer in both the greeklish and english words. In order to avoid that, the 0.7 version of the plugin comes with a reverse stemmer for greek words, which produces the different forms of the a greek word (from singular to plural and vice versa) in order to produce their greeklish version.

Now the greeklish word converter has two phases. The first phase produces the diffent forms of a greek word based on some grammar rules, and the second phase produces the greeklish version of each of theses greek words.

This functionality is enabled by default. But, it can be disabled by setting greek_variants variable in the elasticsearch configuration file.

Example usage:

index:
  analysis:
    filter:
      greeklish_analysis:
        type: greeklish
        max_expansions: 15
        greek_variants: false

This filter acts only on greek lowercase characters and for this reason it should be applied after greek lowercase filter.