Azure Search: How to add unsupported Language support

Question

So, with ElasticSearch Managed service you can add your own plugins or bundles - these can be stemmers, dictionaries etc and this functionality enables you to support FTS for languages that have no support out of the box.

Does Azure Cognitive Search support any way to add new language support - in a similar way to this, or any other way?

Answer 1

Hi @richardm ,
Just to clarify are you referring to natural language support? for Unsupported language deployments please see this doc: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/translator/custom-translator/unsupported-language-deployments

-Grace

Answer 2

Hi @richardm ,

Thanks for your patience and for providing more clarity about your scenario.

Although Azure Cognitive Search doesn’t support custom plugin integrations, there is rich language support for lexical analysis of content. This includes 35 language analyzers from Lucene and 50 in-house Microsoft ones which are building using Office and Bing NLP technology. These analyzers can be defined as field properties in the index schema letting the user how the content is indexed and queried. You can find the complete list of languages here - Add language analyzers to string fields - Azure Cognitive Search | Microsoft Learn

In addition, you can customize the analyzers by combining different analysis components like tokenizers, char filters, and token filters to achieve the exact scenario required for the application. Please see more details here - Add custom analyzers to string fields - Azure Cognitive Search | Microsoft Learn

If this solution doesn't meet the requirements for your scenario, let us know so we can take this conversation offline. Please send us an email to azcommunity@microsoft.com with the link to this question and the subject "Attn: Grace".

Best,
Grace