Flex vs. Exact Search - question

[TYA]

Great day all.  Can someone explain why I was only able to find this phrase under an Exact search, but not a flex search (see attached)?  Thank you.

[Λύχνις Δαν]

I'll take a guess, that the hyphenated word is considered one word rather than two, because I'll note that searching for possessed and raving mad doesn't find it either.

 

Thx

D

[TYA]

I'll take a guess, that the hyphenated word is considered one word rather than two

 

Yes, but as the screenshot shows, I searched it both with and without the hyphen under Flex search, and it wasn't found either way.

Edited December 2, 2018 by TYA

[Λύχνις Δαν]

I think a flex search will only permute (conjugate etc) words. That leaves then two choices:

 

  1. demon-possessed is modelled as one word but as it is not treated as a lemma, the search cannot find it,

  2. demon-possessed is modelled as two words but the flex search cannot handle such forms as variants of the entered forms

  3. I'm wrong and the answer is something completely different

 

  The argument in favor of 1 is that searches for Tubal or for Cain both fail to find Tubal-Cain as do searches for demon or possessed fail to find demon-possessed. And that if you open an NIV 2011 tab and have the quick entry enabled and type demon demon-possessed shows up. Interestingly when the search, if you select this choice, is done, it automatically puts quotes around it. It's being done as an inflected search. This seems to be a confusing thing actually, quotes ensure an inflected search, not an exact one. And =demon-possessed fails to find a hit.

 

  Support for option 2 is non-existent because trying to search for demon <AND> possessed fails to find this hit. Also that you cannot search for demon .- possessed.

 

  Instances of evidence for 3 are too numerous to catalog

 

  Oh and this will find what you want with hyphenated form : demon*possessed and raving mad

 

Thx

D

[TYA]

1. demon-possessed is modelled as one word but as it is not treated as a lemma, the search cannot find it,

 

If I'm understanding what you mean by "modelled as one word," then that might explain why I just found the phrase (typed precisely this way...) "demonpossessed and raving mad" under Exact search in the Research tab (see attached image).

 

(Note: I do love Accordance' ability to search "All Texts," "All Tools," and mostly, "All" in the Research tab.  When I'm looking for a phrase that I loosely remember from Scripture, I often use the Research Tab and search "All Texts" to widen the possibility of getting a hit, since it is searching across numerous versions).  Thanks again, Accordance, for the Research tab!

 

Oh and this will find what you want with hyphenated form : demon*possessed and raving mad

 

Yes, I confirm that this works for a Flex search in the Research tab.  Thanks for discovering this, D.  Now I know that if I suspect that part of a word or phrase has a hyphen, I may want to substitute an asterisk instead.  But hopefully such occurrences would be rare, and hopefully I won't forget this rule (or Accordance will make a solution to it--one or the other).

 

Thanks!

Edited December 2, 2018 by TYA

[Fabian]

Yes a good question.

 

Only in User Content it found demon-possessed with flex search, like in the Miracles of Jesus from the Accordance Exchange. Or another User Tool I have with this content.

 

Greetings

 

Fabian

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Incidentally, if you want to find all hyphenated words you can do a search for .-

There are 566 of them in the NIV.

Though the last one is a bit puzzling :

 

        two = 0
                    H00752    ’arba‘    אַרְבַּע = 0
                    H02256    we    וְ = 0
                    H09109    shenayim    שְׁנַיִם = 0

 

  This last one might be a bug in the Analysis tab data - it doesn't appear in Concordance data.

 

Thx

D

[TYA]

Thank you, D.