Solr Integration in the Anserini Information Retrieval Toolkit

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.