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May 29, 2026

MentisDB 0.9.9 — Thesaurus on by Default

The big advance in 0.9.9 is that the static thesaurus (≈900 headwords + 300+ irregular verb lemmas) now applies automatically by default to every ranked search query — REST, MCP, dashboard, CLI, and the official benchmarks.

No extra parameters. No client changes. Just better recall on vocabulary mismatch and verb forms out of the box.

The Numbers

BenchmarkMetricResultNotes
LoCoMo (10-persona)R@1072.6%Matches WHITEPAPER target; +27.7pp vs weak-vector baseline
LongMemEvalR@566.8%Real fastembed-minilm vectors + thesaurus active (no reranking)

The thesaurus was validated on real data with proper embeddings. LoCoMo multi-hop and vocabulary-mismatch queries see the expected lift. The internal research harness previously showed +31% NDCG; that improvement is now live for everyone.

How It Works

A small helper apply_thesaurus_if_text() is called automatically after every text-bearing RankedSearchQuery construction in the server (ranked search, federated search, and context bundles). It runs thesaurus::expand_text() (the same embedded data from 0.9.8) and wires the result through the existing with_synonyms(..., 0.7) path.

The fast path in the lexical scorer still fires when there are no expansions, so baseline latency is unaffected.

Upgrade

cargo install mentisdb --force (or rebuild from source with --features local-embeddings for full vector support).

Existing clients and prompts continue to work unchanged — they just get better results.