SPLADE-Index⚡

splade-index: https://github.com/rasyosef/splade-index

SPLADE is a neural retrieval model which learns query/document sparse expansion. Sparse representations benefit from several advantages compared to dense approaches: efficient use of inverted index, explicit lexical match, interpretability... They also seem to be better at generalizing on out-of-domain data (BEIR benchmark).

For more information about SPLADE models, please refer to the following.

• SPLADE: Sparse Lexical and Expansion Model for First Stage Ranking
• List of Pretrained Sparse Encoder (Sparse Embeddings) Models
• Training and Finetuning Sparse Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers v5.

Installation

You can install splade-index with pip:

pip install splade-index

Recommended (but optional) dependencies:

# To speed up the top-k selection process, you can install `jax`
pip install "jax[cpu]"

Quickstart

Here is a simple example of how to use splade-index:

from sentence_transformers import SparseEncoder
from splade_index import SPLADE

# Download a SPLADE model from the 🤗 Hub
model = SparseEncoder("rasyosef/splade-tiny")

# Create your corpus here
corpus = [
    "a cat is a feline and likes to purr",
    "a dog is the human's best friend and loves to play",
    "a bird is a beautiful animal that can fly",
    "a fish is a creature that lives in water and swims",
]

# Create the SPLADE retriever and index the corpus
retriever = SPLADE()
retriever.index(model=model, documents=corpus)

# Query the corpus
queries = ["does the fish purr like a cat?"]

# Get top-k results as a tuple of (doc ids, documents, scores). All three are arrays of shape (n_queries, k).
results = retriever.retrieve(queries, k=2)
doc_ids, result_docs, scores = results.doc_ids, results.documents, results.scores

for i in range(doc_ids.shape[1]):
    doc_id, doc, score = doc_ids[0, i], result_docs[0, i], scores[0, i]
    print(f"Rank {i+1} (score: {score:.2f}) (doc_id: {doc_id}): {doc}")

# You can save the index to a directory
retriever.save("animal_index_splade")

# ...and load it when you need it
import splade_index

reloaded_retriever = splade_index.SPLADE.load("animal_index_splade", model=model)