Language/country specific synonyms

[orangejulius]

There has been a lot of discussion and chatter about synonyms lately, so I wanted to throw out an idea we've probably all had:

What would it take to have country or language specific synonyms that were not applied globally?

Background

The Pelias schema contains a couple different files that list synonyms of various types, such as street/st, &/and, etc. They are currently applied globally, and due to the nature of the Pelias core team and users/customers experience, are very English/USA-centric.

When we set up Pelias for clients that care about specific languages, a big part of the customization is usually setting up synonyms relevant to their situation. For several reasons, we often don't bring these back into Pelias core.

Partially, it's the complexity of managing all the lists of synonyms, but also the performance.

For example, in Catalonia, Spain, the word for street, carrer, is often abbreviated c. This ends up having a big performance impact on Pelias since any query for any word starting with c can end up matching every road in Spain.

Solutions?

Since we now apply synonyms only at index time, we might be able to be smart about it and apply only regionally specific synonyms. What would it take for this to happen?