Event News

Sease at ApacheCon North America

ApacheCon
North America

ApacheCon brought together users with the largest collection of global Apache project communities through detailed sessions, hands-on workshops, and standalone Apache project tracks.

Location: Canal Street, New Orleans
Date: 3rd-6th October 2022

// our talk

Neural Search Comes to Apache Solr:
Approximate Nearest Neighbor,
BERT and More!

6th October, Sheraton

Learning To Rank has been the first integration of machine learning techniques with Apache Solr allowing you to improve the ranking of your search results using training data.

One limitation is that documents have to contain the keywords that the user typed in the search box in order to be retrieved(and then reranked). For example, the query “jaguar” won’t retrieve documents containing only the terms “panthera onca”. This is called the vocabulary mismatch problem.

Neural search is an Artificial Intelligence technique that allows a search engine to reach those documents that are semantically similar to the user’s information need without necessarily containing those query terms; it learns the similarity of terms and sentences in your collection through deep neural networks and numerical vector representation(so no manual synonyms are needed!).

This talk explores the first Apache Solr official contribution about this topic, available from Apache Solr 9.0.

We start with an overview of neural search (Don’t worry – we keep it simple!): we describe vector representations for queries and documents, and how Approximate K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) vector search works. We show how neural search can be used along with deep learning techniques (e.g, BERT) or directly on vector data, and how we implemented this feature in Apache Solr, giving usage examples!

Join us as we explore this new exciting Apache Solr feature and learn how you can leverage it to improve your search experience!

// slides
// our speaker

Alessandro Benedetti

Founder @ Sease
APACHE LUCENE/SOLR COMMITTER
APACHE SOLR PMC MEMBER
// video

Author

Lisa Biella

Lisa Biella is a creative digital marketer, geek at heart who is enthusiastic about technology and how it affects people’s lives.

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