# Elasticsearch nested phrase search within a certain distance

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-nested-phrase-search-within-a-certain-distance/312757>\
**Category:** Elasticsearch\
**Tags:** eql-elastic-query-language\
**Created:** [August 24, 2022, 4:44am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-nested-phrase-search-within-a-certain-distance/312757 "2022-08-24T04:44:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Sumit\_Jha1](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/sumit_jha1/32/100878_2.png) [@Sumit\_Jha1](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sumit_Jha1)\
**Post date:** [August 24, 2022, 4:44am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-nested-phrase-search-within-a-certain-distance/312757/1 "2022-08-24T04:44:45Z")

</div>

Sample ES Document

```auto
{
    // other properties

    "transcript" : [
      {
        "id" : 0,
        "user_type" : "A",
        "phrase" : "hi good afternoon"
      },
      {
        "id" : 1,
        "user_type" : "B",
        "phrase" : "hey"
      }
      {
        "id" : 2,
        "user_type" : "A",
        "phrase_analyzed" : "hi "
      }
      {
        "id" : 3,
        "user_type" : "B",
        "phrase" : "my name is john"
      }
    ]
  }

```

`transcript` is a nested field whose mapping looks like

```auto
{
   "type":"nested",
   "properties": {
      "id":{
         "type":"integer"
      }
      "phrase": {
         "type":"text",
         "analyzer":"standard"
      },
      "user_type": {
         "type":"keyword"
      }
   }
}

```

I need to search for two phrases inside transcript that are apart by at max a given distance `d`.

For example:

1. If the phrases are `hi` and `name` and `d` is `1`, the above document match because `hi` is present in third nested object, and `name` is present in fourth nested object. (Note: `hi` in first nested object and `name` in fourth nested object is NOT valid, as they are apart by more than `d=1` distance)

2. If the phrases are `good` and `name` and `d` is `1`, the above document does not match because `good` and `name` are `3` distance apart.

3. If both phrases are present in same sentence, the distance is considered as `0`.

Possible Solution:

1. I can fetch all documents where both phrases are present and on the application side, I can discard documents where phrases were more than the given threshold(`d`) apart. The problem in this case could be that I cannot get the count of such documents beforehand in order to show in the UI as _found in 100 documents out of 1900_ (as without processing from application side, we can't be sure if the document is indeed a match or not, and it's not feasible to do processing for all documents in index)

2. Second possible solution is:

```auto
{
	"query": {
		"bool": {

			// suppose d = 2

			// if first phrase occurs at 0th offset, second phrase can occur at 
			// ... 0th, 1st or 2nd offset

			// if first phrase occurs at 1st offset, second phrase can occur at 
			// ... 1st, 2nd or 3rd offset

			// any one of above permutation should exist

			"should": [
				{
					// search for 1st permutation
				},
				{
					// search for 2nd permutation
				},
				...
			]
		}
	}
}

```

This is clearly not scalable as if `d` is large, and if the transcript is large, the query is going to be very very big.

Kindly suggest any approach.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [September 21, 2022, 4:45am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-nested-phrase-search-within-a-certain-distance/312757/2 "2022-09-21T04:45:15Z")

</div>

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