Solr spellchecker not returning any results

Question

I am working on an application that requires me to use Solr for the first time. I got it set up, indexing the correct data, and querying as I would like it, but I cannot seem to get the spellcheck component working properly. No matter what I query, the spellchecker will not return any suggestions. I have included the relevant parts of my solrconfig and schema.xml.

schema.xml

<fieldType name="textSpell" class="solr.TextField" positionIncrementGap="100" omitNorms="true">
  <analyzer type="index">
    <charFilter class="solr.HTMLStripCharFilterFactory"/>
    <tokenizer class="solr.StandardTokenizerFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.StopFilterFactory" ignoreCase="true" words="stopwords.txt"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.StandardFilterFactory"/>
  </analyzer>
  <analyzer type="query">
    <tokenizer class="solr.StandardTokenizerFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.SynonymFilterFactory" synonyms="synonyms.txt" ignoreCase="true"  expand="true"/>
    <filter class="solr.StopFilterFactory" ignoreCase="true" words="stopwords.txt"/>
    <filter class="solr.LowerCaseFilterFactory"/>
    <filter class="solr.StandardFilterFactory"/>
  </analyzer>
</fieldType>

<!-- CUT -->

<field name="spell" type="textSpell" indexed="true" stored="true" />

solrconfig.xml

<requestHandler name="/select" class="solr.SearchHandler">
   <lst name="defaults">
     <str name="defType">edismax</str>
     <str name="spellcheck.dictionary">default</str>
     <str name="spellcheck.onlyMorePopular">false</str>
     <!-- <str name="spellcheck.extendedResults">false</str> -->
     <str name="spellcheck.count">3</str>

    <str name="qf">
      frontlist_flapcopy^0.5 title^2.0  subtitle^1.0 series^1.5 author^3.0 frontlist_ean^6.0
    </str>
    <str name="pf">
      frontlist_flapcopy^0.5 title^2.0  subtitle^1.0 series^1.5 author^3.0 frontlist_ean^6.0
    </str>
    <str name="fl">
      title,subtitle,series,author,eans,formats,prices,frontlist_ean,onsaledate,imprint,frontlist_flapcopy
    </str>
    <str name="mm">
      2&lt;-1 5&lt;-2 6&lt;90%
    </str>
    <int name="ps">100</int>
    <bool name="hl">true</bool>
    <str name="q.alt">*:*</str>
    <str name="hl.fl">title,subtitle,series,author,frontlist_flapcopy</str>
    <str name="f.title.hl.fragsize">0</str>
    <str name="f.title.hl.alternateField">title</str>
    <str name="f.subtitle.hl.fragsize">0</str>
    <str name="f.subtitle.hl.alternateField">url</str>
    <str name="f.series.hl.fragsize">0</str>
    <str name="f.series.hl.alternateField">url</str>
    <str name="f.author.hl.fragsize">0</str>
    <str name="f.author.hl.alternateField">url</str>
    <str name="f.frontlist_flapcopy.hl.fragsize">0</str>
    <str name="f.frontlist_flapcopy.hl.alternateField">url</str>

    <str name="echoParams">explicit</str>
    <float name="accuracy">0.7</float>
   </lst>

   <lst name="appends">
       <str name="fq">forsaleinusa:true</str>
   </lst>
   <arr name="last-components">
      <str>spellcheck</str>
   </arr>
</requestHandler>

<!-- CUT -->

<searchComponent name="spellcheck" class="solr.SpellCheckComponent">
  <lst name="spellchecker">
    <str name="name">default</str>
    <str name="classname">solr.IndexBasedSpellChecker</str>
    <str name="field">spell</str>
    <str name="spellcheckIndexDir">/path/to/my/spell/index</str>
    <str name="accuracy">0.7</str>
    <float name="thresholdTokenFrequency">.0001</float>
  </lst>

  <lst name="spellchecker">
    <str name="name">jarowinkler</str>
    <str name="classname">solr.IndexBasedSpellChecker</str>
    <str name="field">spell</str>
    <str name="distanceMeasure">org.apache.lucene.search.spell.JaroWinklerDistance</str>
    <str name="spellcheckIndexDir">/path/to/my/spell/index</str>
  </lst>

  <str name="queryAnalyzerFieldType">textSpell</str>
</searchComponent>

When I go to http://localhost:8983/solr/select/?q=query&spellcheck.build=true then look at the files generated in /path/to/my/spell/index, there is a segments.gen and a segments_1, both of which contain only a few bytes of binary data. Then, when I enter a query and append &spellcheck=true to the query string, I get no suggestions, no matter my query:

<lst name="spellcheck">
  <lst name="suggestions"/>
</lst>

Any idea what is going on here?

Answer 1

I had a very similar problem that I was never able to resolve. Someone posted a detailed answer on my question that may be able to help you out:

solr suggester not returning any results

Answer 2

I ended up resolving this issue a while ago, but to my recollection, the issue was that I was using multiple <copyField/> directives to copy data to the "spell" field, but I did not set multiValued="true" on that field. When I made the spellcheck field multivalued, it worked like a charm!