Vespa.ai Live 2026
An in-person event for the practitioners shaping the next generation of AI-powered search and retrieval systems.
This year’s agenda includes speakers from Etsy, Walmart, Ravenpack, and more.
Location: Lumiere London, London
Date: 9th-10th September 2026
// our talk
Evaluating Search in the LLM Era: Tools for Data & Vectors
10th september 2:45-3:15pm
This talk explores two neighbouring areas in modern search quality evaluation: preparing the ground-truth dataset of queries and ratings, and identifying the causes of the problems we see in our vector search implementation. Building datasets manually is expensive: queries can be extracted from production logs (when available), but relating queries to documents with a reasonable relevance rating is hard, requires a lot of time from human experts, and it’s extremely boring, so it’s likely that a human, after a while, will lose interest, and ratings become more approximate.
// our speakers
Alessandro Benedetti
DIRECTOR @ SEASE
APACHE LUCENE/SOLR COMMITTER
CHAIR OF THE APACHE SOLR PMC
