OpenNIR: A complete neural ad-hoc ranking pipeline

Abstract

With the growing popularity of neural approaches for ad-hoc ranking, there is a need for tools that can effectively reproduce prior results and ease continued research by supporting current state-of-the-art approaches. Although several excellent neural ranking tools exist, none offer an easy end-to-end ad-hoc neural raking pipeline. A complete pipeline is particularly important for ad-hoc ranking because there are numerous parameter settings that have a considerable effect on the ultimate performance yet often are under-reported in current work (e.g., initial ranking settings, re-ranking threshold, training sampling strategy, etc.). In this work, I present a complete ad-hoc neural ranking pipeline which addresses these shortcomings: OpenNIR. The pipeline is easy to use (a single command will download required data, train, and evaluate a model), yet highly configurable, allowing for continued work in areas that are understudied. Aside from the core pipeline, the software also includes several bells and whistles that make use of components of the pipeline, such as performance benchmarking and tuning of unsupervised ranker parameters for fair comparisons against traditional baselines. The pipeline and these capabilities are demonstrated. The code is available, and contributions are welcome.