Parrot: A Python-based Interactive Platform for Information Retrieval Research

Open source softwares play an important role in information retrieval research. Most of the existing open source information retrieval systems are implemented in Java or C++ programming language. In this paper, we propose Parrot1, a Python-based interactive platform for information retrieval research. The proposed platform has mainly three advantages in comparison with the existing retrieval systems: (1) It is integrated with Jupyter Notebook, an interactive programming platform which has proved to be effective for data scientists to tackle big data and AI problems. As a result, users can interactively visualize and diagnose a retrieval model; (2) As an application written in Python, it can be easily used in combination with the popular deep learning frameworks such as Tersorflow and Pytorch; (3) It is designed especially for researchers. Less code is needed to create a new retrieval model or to modify an existing one. Our efforts have focused on three functionalists: good usability, interactive programming, and good interoperability with the popular deep learning frameworks. To confirm the performance of the proposed system, we conduct comparative experiments on a number of standard test collections. The experimental results show that the proposed system is both efficient and effective, providing a practical framework for researchers in information retrieval.