Autocomplete searches don't work

[gaurav]

NameRes is used by the Translator UI to support autocomplete, so partial searches need to work.

For example, if the UI searches for diabe with autocomplete=true, we would expect to get back diabetes as well as a number of other results: https://name-lookup.ci.transltr.io/lookup?string=diabe&autocomplete=true&highlighting=false&offset=0&limit=10

But this doesn't currently work: https://namelookup-es.ci.transltr.io/lookup?string=diabe&autocomplete=true&highlighting=false&offset=0&limit=10

[shuchenliu]

This issue is fixed on the surface by #13 . However, we probably still have to think about how we should address the result disparity caused by the different scoring/ranking between ES and Solr

[gaurav]

we should address the result disparity caused by the different scoring/ranking between ES and Solr

How should we proceed? Some ideas:

1. One option is to have a look at how the scoring currently works in NameRes and see if you can replicate it in NameRes ES.
2. Incidentally, I've been working on some improvements to that scoring in Replace scaled clique identifier count with stepped clique identifier count NCATSTranslator/NameResolution#211, but that's still in development. But feel free to steal ideas from there as well.

NameRes has been tweaked extensively and iteratively to get to what I think of as "good" responses in most cases, but by no means is it perfectly or well-written for that goal. If you start to scratch, I would suggest implementing one features at a time and see if e.g. you can get autocomplete towards diabetes working well. You can use Babel Explorer (https://translatorsri.github.io/babel-explorer/autocomplete/?q=dia&target=dev&target=ci&target=prod&target=es_ci) to play around with the autocomplete to see what a user would see and how ES differs from Solr.

[gaurav]

It's also hard to quantify what "good" even means. I think once y'all have some kind of prefer-popular-concepts logic in there (i.e. when searching for "diabetes", I would expect type 1/type 2 diabetes to be high in the results and diabetes inspidus in the top 5), we might want to just ask other Translator folks to try it out, either via Babel Explorer or by asking UI to switch CI to use NameRes CI. That will generate a bunch of feedback on what needs to change.

[gaurav]

I'm going to try to quantify what "good" means in TranslatorSRI/babel-validation#94 -- so feel free to close this since the autocomplete issue is fixed, and then we can open new issues once I have actionable things to work on.