magibney commented on a change in pull request #476: URL: https://github.com/apache/solr/pull/476#discussion_r787980804
########## File path: solr/solr-ref-guide/src/dense-vector-search.adoc ########## @@ -0,0 +1,308 @@ += Dense Vector Search +// Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one +// or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file +// distributed with this work for additional information +// regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file +// to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the +// "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance +// with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at +// +// http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 +// +// Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, +// software distributed under the License is distributed on an +// "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY +// KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the +// specific language governing permissions and limitations +// under the License. + +The Apache Solr *Dense Vector Search* module adds support for indexing and searching dense numerical vectors. + +https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning[Deep learning] can be used to produce a vector representation of both the query and the documents in a corpus of information. + +These neural network-based techniques are usually referred to as neural search, an industry derivation from the academic field of https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2017/06/fntir2018-neuralir-mitra.pdf[Neural information Retrieval]. + +== Important Concepts + +=== Dense Vector Representation +A dense vector describes information as an array of elements, each of them explicitly defined. Review comment: >each of them explicitly defined This statement reads a little bit unclear to me. In my reading, this means that the _values_ of vectors are not implicitly derived from "normal" doc or user text input (in the manner of tokenization), but are rather determined externally (e.g., by a custom model) and supplied explicitly to Solr. But it's easy to interpret this statement as suggesting that the semantic significance of each dimension is explicitly defined, which iiuc is definitely _not_ the case. If I'm correctly characterizing the meaning of the above statement (and please correct me if I'm not!), I think it might be worth expanding on this a bit to explicitly clarify that in order to leverage this feature, a user _needs_ an external means of generating vectors from content. I think in context, that's probably what you're getting at by referring to "Various deep learning models..." immediately below, but I think the connection could stand to be more explicit. (incidentally, even if perhaps not worth noting in the refguide: there may well be applications -- e.g., scientific? -- for searching vector similarity that actually have nothing at all to do with language models, machine learning, etc...) -- This is an automated message from the Apache Git Service. To respond to the message, please log on to GitHub and use the URL above to go to the specific comment. To unsubscribe, e-mail: issues-unsubscr...@solr.apache.org For queries about this service, please contact Infrastructure at: us...@infra.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: issues-unsubscr...@solr.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: issues-h...@solr.apache.org
