Anserini

Abstract

This work tackles the perennial problem of reproducible baselines in information retrieval research, focusing on bag-of-words ranking models. Although academic information retrieval researchers have a long history of building and sharing systems, they are primarily designed to facilitate the publication of research papers. As such, these systems are often incomplete, inflexible, poorly documented, difficult to use, and slow, particularly in the context of modern web-scale collections. Furthermore, the growing complexity of modern software ecosystems and the resource constraints most academic research groups operate under make maintaining open-source systems a constant struggle. However, except for a small number of companies (mostly commercial web search engines) that deploy custom infrastructure, Lucene has become the de facto platform in industry for building search applications. Lucene has an active developer base, a large audience of users, and diverse capabilities to work with heterogeneous collections at scale. However, it lacks systematic support for ad hoc experimentation using standard test collections. We describe Anserini, an information retrieval toolkit built on Lucene that fills this gap. Our goal is to simplify ad hoc experimentation and allow researchers to easily reproduce results with modern bag-of-words ranking models on diverse test collections. With Anserini, we demonstrate that Lucene provides a suitable framework for supporting information retrieval research. Experiments show that our system efficiently indexes large web collections, provides modern ranking models that are on par with research implementations in terms of effectiveness, and supports low-latency query evaluation to facilitate rapid experimentation