project-description.md

Pyserini is a Python toolkit for reproducible information retrieval research with sparse and dense representations. Retrieval using sparse representations is provided via integration with our group's Anserini IR toolkit, which is built on Lucene. Retrieval using dense representations is provided via integration with Facebook's Faiss library.

Pyserini is primarily designed to provide effective, reproducible, and easy-to-use first-stage retrieval in a multi-stage ranking architecture. Our toolkit is self-contained as a standard Python package and comes with queries, relevance judgments, pre-built indexes, and evaluation scripts for many commonly used IR test collections

Installation

Install via PyPI:

pip install pyserini

Pyserini requires Python 3.6+ and Java 11 (due to its dependency on Anserini).

Since dense retrieval depends on neural networks, Pyserini requires a more complex set of dependencies to use this feature. A pip installation will automatically pull in the 🤗 Transformers library to satisfy the package requirements. Pyserini also depends on PyTorch and Faiss, but since these packages may require platform-specific custom configuration, they are not explicitly listed in the package requirements. We leave the installation of these packages to you. Refer to documentation in our repo for additional details.

Usage

The SimpleSearcher class provides the entry point for sparse retrieval using bag-of-words representations. Anserini supports a number of pre-built indexes for common collections that it'll automatically download for you and store in ~/.cache/pyserini/indexes/. Here's how to use a pre-built index for the MS MARCO passage ranking task and issue a query interactively (using BM25 ranking):

from pyserini.search import SimpleSearcher

searcher = SimpleSearcher.from_prebuilt_index('msmarco-passage')
hits = searcher.search('what is a lobster roll?')

for i in range(0, 10):
    print(f'{i+1:2} {hits[i].docid:7} {hits[i].score:.5f}')

The results should be as follows:

 1 7157707 11.00830
 2 6034357 10.94310
 3 5837606 10.81740
 4 7157715 10.59820
 5 6034350 10.48360
 6 2900045 10.31190
 7 7157713 10.12300
 8 1584344 10.05290
 9 533614  9.96350
10 6234461 9.92200

The SimpleDenseSearcher class provides the entry point for dense retrieval, and its usage is quite similar to SimpleSearcher. The only additional thing we need to specify for dense retrieval is the query encoder.

from pyserini.dsearch import SimpleDenseSearcher, TctColBertQueryEncoder

encoder = TctColBertQueryEncoder('castorini/tct_colbert-msmarco')
searcher = SimpleDenseSearcher.from_prebuilt_index(
    'msmarco-passage-tct_colbert-hnsw',
    encoder
)
hits = searcher.search('what is a lobster roll')

for i in range(0, 10):
    print(f'{i+1:2} {hits[i].docid:7} {hits[i].score:.5f}')

The results should be as follows:

 1 7157710 70.53742
 2 7157715 70.50040
 3 7157707 70.13804
 4 6034350 69.93666
 5 6321969 69.62683
 6 4112862 69.34587
 7 5515474 69.21354
 8 7157708 69.08416
 9 6321974 69.06841
10 2920399 69.01737

For complete documentation, please refer to our repo.