ALESSANDRO BENEDETTI
DIRECTOR | R&D SOFTWARE ENGINEER | SEARCH CONSULTANT
APACHE LUCENE/SOLR COMMITTER
CHAIR OF THE APACHE SOLR PMC
APACHE MANIFOLDCF COMMITTER
Senior Search Software Engineer, his focus is on R&D in Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.
He firmly believes in Open Source as a way to build a bridge between Academia and Industry and facilitate the progress of applied research.
How Large Language Models Can Help Your Search Project
Alessandro Benedetti is the author behind the new Springer book about Large Language Models. In this book you can find:
- The state of the art in LLM applications in IR with an emphasis on industrial adoption via open source software
- How the most popular open source search engines interact with LLMs
- How to implement the ideas described and highlights positives, negatives and possible limitations
Biography
Alessandro Benedetti is an Apache Lucene/Solr committer and chair of the Apache Solr PMC.
Experience with a great variety of clients has taught him to be a proficient and professional consultant.
Alessandro is a passionate R&D software engineer at heart, continuously applying the latest trends in Information Retrieval and AI/Machine Learning to solve interesting search problems.
He’s been studying Machine Learning applications such as Learning To Rank and Natural Language Techniques for years and more recently he’s been exploring Generative AI technologies and approaches such as Large Language Models and Retrieval Augmented Generation to improve the search user experience.
He’s curious and actively coding and experimenting on a weekly basis.
When he isn’t on clients’ projects, he is actively contributing to the open source community and presenting the applications of leading-edge techniques in real-world scenarios at meetups and conferences such as ECIR, the Lucene/Solr Revolution, ApacheCon, Haystack, FOSDEM, Berlin Buzzword, and Open Source Summit.
Expertise
- Apache Lucene/Solr
- Elasticsearch/OpenSearch
- Information Retrieval/Search
- LLMs and Generative AI
- Machine Learning
- Public Speaking
- Project Management
- Java/Python
Research Topics
✓ Large Language Models in Search
✓ Neural (Vector-based) Search
✓ Document Similarity
✓ Learning To Rank
✓ Query parsing and expansion
✓ Search Quality Evaluation
