The importance of repeatability, replicability, and reproducibility is broadly recognized in the computational sciences, both in supporting desirable scientific methodology as well as sustaining empirical progress. This workshop tackles the replicability challenge for ad hoc document retrieval, via a common Docker interface specification to support images that capture systems performing ad hoc retrieval experiments on standard test collections.

Anserini is an open-source information retrieval toolkit built around Lucene to facilitate replicable research. In this demonstration, we examine different architectures for Solr integration in order to address two current limitations of the system: the lack of an interactive search interface and support for distributed retrieval. Two architectures are explored: In the first approach, Anserini is used as a frontend to index directly into a running Solr instance. In the second approach, Lucene indexes built directly with Anserini can be copied into a Solr installation and placed under its management. We discuss the tradeoffs associated with each architecture and report the results of a performance evaluation comparing indexing throughput. To illustrate the additional capabilities enabled by Anserini/Solr integration, we present a search interface built using the open-source Blacklight discovery interface.

Despite the broad adoption of both Apache Spark and Apache Solr, there is little integration between these two platforms to support scalable, end-to-end text analytics. We believe this is a missed opportunity, as there is substantial synergy in building analytical pipelines where the results of potentially complex faceted queries feed downstream text processing components. This demonstration explores exactly such an integration: we evaluate performance under different analytical scenarios and present three simple case studies that illustrate the range of possible analyses enabled by seamlessly connecting Spark to Solr.