Spacerini: Plug-and-play Search Engines with Pyserini and Hugging Face
This tool addresses the need for non-IR practitioners, NLP researchers, and IR researchers to more easily build and deploy search engines, though it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks.
The authors tackled the problem of making state-of-the-art information retrieval models more accessible by developing Spacerini, a tool that integrates Pyserini and Hugging Face to enable easy construction and deployment of interactive search engines, resulting in a portfolio of 13 search engines for various use cases.
We present Spacerini, a tool that integrates the Pyserini toolkit for reproducible information retrieval research with Hugging Face to enable the seamless construction and deployment of interactive search engines. Spacerini makes state-of-the-art sparse and dense retrieval models more accessible to non-IR practitioners while minimizing deployment effort. This is useful for NLP researchers who want to better understand and validate their research by performing qualitative analyses of training corpora, for IR researchers who want to demonstrate new retrieval models integrated into the growing Pyserini ecosystem, and for third parties reproducing the work of other researchers. Spacerini is open source and includes utilities for loading, preprocessing, indexing, and deploying search engines locally and remotely. We demonstrate a portfolio of 13 search engines created with Spacerini for different use cases.