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Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
02:14
11
Q: Synonyms seem to behave differently when searching for them

VLAZUsually, if tag [a] is a synonym of [b] then searching for [a] will only return a search for [b]. Because, for all intents and purposes, they are the same tag and the synonym direction determines one as the main public-facing tag, the other being replaced with the main tag on almost every occasio...

support status-bydesign tags tag-synonyms tag-search
1
A: Synonyms seem to behave differently when searching for them

kristinalustigThis is by design. You can refer to my answer on a separate post here. Basically, we changed this behavior to make sure that there were no tags that are simply not searchable. It's not an all-encompassing fix (complex query behavior remains the same) but it at least makes those previously unsearc...

24
Q: How to find a question by its old tag when that tag is synonymized with another

cottontailOn Meta, chatgpt has been synonymized with ai-generated-content, but when I go to its tag page, there are only 7 questions listed when I know that there were way more questions with the chatgpt tag alone. Sure enough, there are some questions that are tagged chatgpt but cannot be found by either ...

support status-completed search tag-synonym-process
5
A: How to find a question by its old tag when that tag is synonymized with another

kristinalustigI've fixed this issue. We discussed possible solutions and determined that the most straightforward way to resolve was this workflow: If you search for a single tag with no other terms, and that tag is not the canonical synonym (for example, [chat-gpt]), the search will return results for both [c...

This solution really doesn't seem to fix the problem. Searching for the parent tag alone ai-generated-content only returns 31 questions while searching for the child tag chatgpt returns 87 between the that child and the parent. The parent tag should be the more important of the two. Searching for the parent should certainly surface posts with any of the child tags which it currently does not. I'm not sure if re status reviewing this is beneficial at this point or if it'd be better to just create a new bug report with the new behaviour and go from there. — Henry Ecker ♦ Oct 13 at 23:50
@HenryEcker I don't agree that a parent should always surface all possible child tags; in terms of specificity, if you're looking for a parent tag, you're not necessarily looking for possibly not-quite-related child tags, but the inverse is (almost?) always true. Also FWIW, before I made this change, you could still get into the [openai-api] or [openai-api] state. I know this solution is not ideal - we were going for a stopgap to at least make previously inaccessible questions searchable. In any case, I'll talk to the team about how else we might want to change it. I hear your feedback. — kristinalustig ♦ Oct 29 at 13:31
@kristinalustig I don't understand what you mean at all about "not-quite-related child tags" this differs extremely from my understanding of the synonym system and the way it functions. We synonymise tags [a] -> [b]. From that point forward every time someone uses the [a] tag it's automatically rewritten as [b]. [b] is the only tag that can be used anywhere on the site from that point forward. So when we're looking for [b] we would 100% expect to also see posted tagged [a] since [a] has been entirely suppressed from being able to exist in the system. — Henry Ecker ♦ Oct 29 at 21:57
If there are not-quite related tags then they should not be synonyms. When we synonymise tags we expect them to behave as identical. That's my understanding of the feature. If two tags are synonymous we want them to behave as if they are the same so that we can find everything on the topic we're looking for. I appreciate the stopgap measure, but I just want to make sure that we have similar understanding. Tag synonyms are billed as an automatic editing mechanism. I think the general expectation is that they would behave as equivalent in search. — Henry Ecker ♦ Oct 29 at 21:59
It's been brought to my attention that I somewhat abused terminology here and could have implied something overly hierarchical when that's not the way that tag synonyms function. By 'parent' in my comment here I meant 'target tag' and by 'child' I meant 'source tag'. It would be more correct for my statement to have read: "The target tag should be the more important of the two. Searching for the target tag should certainly surface posts with any of the source tags which it currently does not." Tag synonyms only have an overwriting one-way relationship not a hierarchy — Henry Ecker ♦ Oct 30 at 11:23

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