Anserini at TREC 2018 : CENTRE , Common Core , and News Tracks

Anserini is an open-source information retrieval toolkit built on Lucene [3, 4]. The goal of our effort is to support information retrieval research using the popular open-source Lucene search library by allowing researchers to easily replicate results with modern ranking models on diverse test collections. Although there are many open-source search engines developed and maintained by academic research groups, most of them are designed primarily to facilitate the publication of research papers, and as such, they often suffer from poor usability, incomplete documentation, and a host of other issues. The growing complexity of modern software ecosystems and the diverse capabilities that are required to build useful end-to-end search applications places academic research groups at a huge disadvantage relative to Lucene. Except for a handful of commercial web search engines that deploy custom infrastructure, Lucene has become the de facto platform in industry for building production search applications—used by organizations as diverse as Twitter, Reddit, Bloomberg, and Target. It has an active developer base, diverse features and capabilities, and lies at the center of a vibrant ecosystem. However, Lucene lacks systematic support for information retrieval research—in particular, ad hoc experimentation using standard test collections. This is where Anserini comes in: we enable cutting-edge information retrieval research using Lucene.