I have a class called SynonymMapping which has a collection of values mapped as a CollectionOfElements
@Entity(name = \"synonymmapping\")
public class Synony
It's generally not a good idea to enforce eager fetching in the mapping - it's better to specify eager joins in appropriate queries (unless you're 100% sure that under any and all circumstances your object won't make sense / be valid without that collection being populated).
The reason you're getting duplicates is because Hibernate internally joins your root and collection tables. Note that they really are duplicates, e.g. for 2 SynonymMappings with 3 collection elements each you would get 6 results (2x3), 3 copies of each SynonymMapping entity. So the easiest workaround is to wrap results in a Set thereby ensuring they're unique.