Sri Lankan Cricketers Search Engine

This repository contains the source code of a search engine which can be used to query Sri Lankan ODI cricketers. This Search engine was built using Elasticsearch and Flask. It supports both Sinhala and English language queries. The information about Sri Lankan cricketers was extracted from the [espncricinfo.com] (https://www.espncricinfo.com/player) website and wikipedia using the BeautifulSoup library.

Directory Structure

├── corpus : scripts realated to data extraction and final corpus
    ├── corpus.json : initial corpus in english language
    ├── corpus_en_to_si_converter.py : convert english text to sinhala using googletrans api
    ├── corpus_preprocessor.py : script to reduce the text field size
    ├── final-corpus.json : final corpus in both english and sinhala languages
    ├── scraper.py : script to exract data espncricinfo.com and wikipedia              
├── objects : player class 
├── utils : utility functions
├── static : UI related CSS files
├── templates : UI HTML related files  
├── app.py : backend of the web app created using Flask
├── create_index.py : script to upload data to Elasticsearch
├── queries.py : script contains all queries
├── search.py : search functions for processing queries and returning results
├── queries.txt :  Example queries supported by search engine  
├── Settings.py :  ES configuration with host, port, and index name
├── requirements.txt : python dependencies

Project Setup

First run the below commands to clone and install dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/LakshanWeerasinghe/Sri_Lankan_Cricketer_Search
cd Sri_Lankan_Cricketer_Search

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then update Settings.py file flask_host, flask_port and es_url fields and up the elasticsearch local server. Finally, run the below commands to create index and run the flask server to search queries.

python create_index.py
python app.py

Data fields

Each cricketer entry contains the following data fields. Biography and Internal Carrier are long text fields.

1. Full Name ( English and Sinhala )
2. Birthday 
3. Batting Style ( English and Sinhala )
4. Bowling Style ( English and Sinhala )
5. Role ( English and Sinhala ) 
6. Education ( English and Sinhala )
7. Biography ( English and Sinhala )
8. International Carrier ( English and Sinhala )
9. Test debut ( English and Sinhala )
10. ODI debut ( English and Sinhala )
11. T20 debut ( English and Sinhala )
12. ODI runs
13. ODI wickets
14. Espncricinfo website url

Data Scraping

The espncricinfo.com website was used to extract the information about Sri Lankan ODI Cricketers. All the data fields mentioned above were extracted from this website apart from the “International Career” field, which was extracted from Wikipedia. For this data extraction process, “BeautifulSoup” which is a HTML/XML parsing library was used along with multithreading to speed up the process. In the Text Preprocessing step, authors names, punctuations, and newline characters were removed. The aforementioned processing was done using simple text replacements and regex operations. Then the cleaned data was passed to a translator to convert it into Sinhala language. The fields “Biography”, “International carrier”, “Test debut”, “ODI debut”, and “T20 debut” were translated using the “googletrans” api and other text fields such as “Role”, “Batting Style”, “Bowling Style”, and “Education” were translated using predefined dictionaries. Finally, the final_corpus.json file was created..

Search Engine

Indexing

The standard indexing methods, mapping and analyzer provided by the Elasticsearch was used.

Searching

First the user query is preprocessed (removing punctuation and stop words, lowercasing) and then tokenized. Then the intent behind the user query is identified. Using the tokenized keywords, intents, and user applied filters (if any) the final query is built English language.
For example queries, refer to queries.txt file.

Advance Features

• Text mining and text preprocessing

  • Search queries are preprocessed by removing punctuations and stop words, lowercasing the letters, and then tokenizing the text.

• Intent Classification

  • Once the query is preprocessed intent behind the query is identified using word vectorization and cosine distance. Following are the five intents that can be identified by the system.

  1. Top search queries
    eg : හොඳම පිතිකරුවන්, හොඳම ක්‍රීඩකයන් 7, top 5 bowlers
  
  2. Worst search queries
     eg : worst 5 batsmen, චොරම bowlers 6
  
  3. Field filtered queries
     eg : දකුණත් පිතිකරුවන් 8, වමත් පිතිකරු, මංගල තරගය බංග්ලාදේශය සමග, debut at Galle
  
  4. Phrase queries
     eg : "ඕස්ට්‍රේලියානු වේග පන්දු පුහුණුකරු", 'පිතිකරණය අලංකාරයට වඩා ඵලදායී'
  
  5. Multi match queries
     eg : දසුන්, ආනන්ද විද්‍යාලය, Muthiah Muralidaran
     
  

• Faceted Search

  • This system supports faceted search related to bowling style and role.

• Bilingual support

  • This system supports both Sinhala and English queries.

• Synonyms support

  • This system supports both Sinhala and English synonyms.

    1. Top synonyms :
          eg : top, best, super, පට්ට, සුපිරිම, හොඳම
    2. Worest synonyms :
          eg : worst, bad, ugly, චොරම, චාටර්ම
    3. Other synonyms :
          eg : batter, batsmen, පිතිකරුවන්, ක්‍රීඩකයා
    

• Resistant to simple spelling errors

  • Using vectorization and distance measurement techniques spelling errors are neglected.

User Interfaces

1. Main Page
   
   
   
   
2. Search Results Page
   
   
   
   
3. Player Details Page