> I don't know about Japanese, but the locale approach works just fine for
> other agglutinative languages. I would rather suspect that it is the
> trigram approach that might be rather useless for such languages,
> because you are going to get a lot of similarity hits for the affixes.
I'm not sure what you mean by "affixes". But I will explain...
A Japanese sentence consists of words. Problem is, each word is not
separated by space (agglutinative). So most text tools such as text
search need preprocess which finds word boundaries by looking up
dictionaries (and smart grammer analysis routine). In the process
"affixes" can be determined and perhaps removed from the target word
group to be used for text search (note that removing affixes is no
relevant to locale). Once we get space separated sentence, it can be
processed by text search or by pg_trgm just same as Engligh. (Note
that these preprocessing are done outside PostgreSQL world). The
difference is just the "word" can be consists of non ASCII letters.
--
Tatsuo Ishii
SRA OSS, Inc. Japan
English: http://www.sraoss.co.jp/index_en.php
Japanese: http://www.sraoss.co.jp