Finite-State Queries in Lucene: * Background, improvement/evolution of MultiTermQuery API in 2.9 and Flex * Implementing existing Lucene queries with NFA/DFA for better performance: Wildcard, Regex, Fuzzy * How you can use this Query programmatically to improve relevance (I'll use an English test collection/English examples) Quick overview of other Lucene features in development, such as: * Flexible Indexing * "More-Flexible" Scoring: challenges/supporting BM25, more vector-space models, field-specific scoring, etc. * Improvements to analysis Bonus: * Lucene / Solr merger explanation and future plans About the presenter: Robert Muir is a super-active Lucene developer. He works as a software developer for Abraxas Corporation. Robert received his MS in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins and BS in CS from Radford University. For the last few years Robert has been working on foreign language NLP problems - "I really enjoy working with Lucene, as it's always receptive to better int'l/language support, even though everyone seems to be a performance freak... such a weird combination!"