Elastic has introduced enhanced support for the Japanese language in its Elasticsearch 8.9 release, allowing for semantic searches and natural language processing (NLP) tasks like sentiment analysis using machine learning models. This enhancement includes integration with Japanese NLP models such as BERT, which are crucial for pre-tokenizing text in languages like Japanese. Users can import models from platforms like Hugging Face into Elasticsearch using Eland, a Python library, to add necessary machine learning functionalities. The blog provides detailed instructions on setting up semantic search through vector embeddings, highlighting the importance of indexing vectorized text for effective searches. Additionally, it shows how sentiment analysis can classify text into positive, neutral, or negative sentiments, further expanding Elasticsearch's capabilities. Feedback on this technical preview is encouraged to improve support for Japanese and other non-English languages. Elastic emphasizes the importance of cautious use of third-party AI tools and acknowledges that most NLP functionalities are first developed for English, with support for other languages being gradually integrated.