Aligning the Research and Practice of Building Search Applications: Elasticsearch and Pyserini

We demonstrate, via competitive bag-of-words first-stage retrieval baselines for the MS MARCO document ranking task, seamless replicability and interoperability between Elasticsearch and the Pyserini IR toolkit, which are both built on the open-source Lucene search library. This integration highlights the benefits of recent efforts to promote the use of Lucene in information retrieval research to better align the research and practice of building search applications. Closer alignment between academia and industry is mutually beneficial: Academic researchers gain a smoother path to real-world impact because their contributions can be more easily deployed in production applications. Industry practitioners gain an easy way to benchmark their innovations in a rigorous and vendor-neutral manner by exploiting evaluation resources and infrastructure built by the academic community. This two-way exchange between academia and industry allows both parties to "have their cakes and eat them too".